How does one go about figuring out a 500 error?

[Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 02:39:28PM +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> Presumably these are feeds served by other people and fetched by his
> Planet install, so it's not clear to me which server logs you mean.

Exactly.  And in one case, I asked the blogger to look at his logs, and he
could find no evidence of my Planet even attempting to access his feed.

>  1. visit the feed URL in your browser

Standard procedure.  Very rarely reveals anything.

>  2. if it's not clear from the browser access what the problem is, have
>     a look at HTTP headers. Some browsers can do this (perhaps with a
>     plugin), or you can use the Perl program HEAD (all capitals)

Or I can use lynx -head -dump.  Usually that's not informative, since I have no
idea what sort of trouble Planet is running into.

> You can also run Planet in DEBUG mode, this may or may not help.

It does not.

> I think the uninformative 500 error is a limitation of either Python's
> URL fetching code or possibly Feedparser. It is often the error returned
> when a feed is unreachable (hostname doesn't exist or request timed
> out).

Both of these issues have been ruled out in most cases.

-- 
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland
http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/newblog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antti-juhani/