Re: [pyOpenSSL] pyopenssl and xmlrpclib

[Andrew G. <aga...@ge...>]

Mihai Ibanescu wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 07:24:17PM -0500, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
>> Andrew Gaffney wrote:
>>
>> Okay, I finally have it "working". My above statement was actually wrong. It 
>> looks like HTTPResponse *does* use makefile(), but HTTPConnection does *not*. 
>> So, it calls close() which decrements the counter without ever calling 
>> makefile() which increments the counter. The way I made it "work" was by 
>> commenting all the calls to .close() and .shutdown(). This is technically 
>> "wrong", but it gets around the faulty close_refcount logic. Can anyone suggest 
>> a better way to do this?
> 
> The history behind that counter is (but this is all based on memory):
> When the response object is created, httplib.HTTPConnection will use
> makefile() to dup() the file descriptor it passes down to the HTTPResponse
> object. This allows the code to be much cleaner, you can now close the main
> connection object and just keep reading from the response one.
> 
> The problem with SSL is, it's not exposing real sockets. As such, there is no
> dup() that works. The only way to achieve the same functionality is to play
> the tricky counter thingie to keep the file descriptor open even after you
> close the HTTPConnection. So, makefile() should increment the counter, and
> close() should keep decrementing it (and do nothing else) until you hit zero,
> at which point it should close the SSL connection.

I completely understand the reason for the counter and the logic behind it. It's 
just that it doesn't quite work as advertised :)

> For the same reason, select() works very unreliably on SSL sockets, because it
> uses the underlying file descriptor/socket to check for incoming bytes. You
> may (and I did) run into the situation where you get a couple of bytes on the
> socket, but not enough to create input into the SSL buffer. So, select() would
> return, but the read from the SSL socket would block.

I've removed all the select() and timeout stuff in my local code, since I don't 
really care if it blocks (unlikely anyway with small xmlrpc requests).

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                   Installer Project