I'm reading files from an FTP server at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This code has been running successfully for years. Recently, they imposed a consistent connection delay of 20 seconds at FTP connection, presumably because they're having some denial of service attack. Python 2.7 urllib2 doesn't seem to use the timeout specified. After 20 seconds, it gives up and times out.
Here's the traceback: Internal error in EDGAR update: <urlopen error ftp error: [Errno 110] Connection timed out> .... File "./edgar/edgarnetutil.py", line 53, in urlopen return(urllib2.urlopen(url,timeout=timeout)) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen return _opener.open(url, data, timeout) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 394, in open response = self._open(req, data) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 412, in _open '_open', req) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 372, in _call_chain result = func(*args) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1379, in ftp_open fw = self.connect_ftp(user, passwd, host, port, dirs, req.timeout) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1400, in connect_ftp fw = ftpwrapper(user, passwd, host, port, dirs, timeout) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 860, in __init__ self.init() File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 866, in init self.ftp.connect(self.host, self.port, self.timeout) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/ftplib.py", line 132, in connect self.sock = socket.create_connection((self.host, self.port), self.timeout) File "/opt/python27/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 571, in create_connection raise err URLError: <urlopen error ftp error: [Errno 110] Connection timed out> Periodic update completed in 21.1 seconds. ---------------------------------------------- Here's the relevant code: TIMEOUTSECS = 60 ## give up waiting for server after 60 seconds ... def urlopen(url,timeout=TIMEOUTSECS) : if url.endswith(".gz") : # gzipped file, must decompress first nd = urllib2.urlopen(url,timeout=timeout) # get connection ... # (NOT .gz FILE, DOESN'T TAKE THIS PATH) else : return(urllib2.urlopen(url,timeout=timeout)) # (OPEN FAILS) TIMEOUTSECS used to be 20 seconds, and I increased it to 60. It didn't help. This isn't an OS problem. The above traceback was on a Linux system. On Windows 7, it fails with "URLError: <urlopen error ftp error: [Errno 10060] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond>" But in both cases, the command line FTP client will work, after a consistent 20 second delay before the login prompt. So the Python timeout parameter isn't working. John Nagle -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list