mountainMath/cansim

Got timeout from StatCan, giving up

colemanrob opened this issue · 6 comments

colemanrob commented

I recently upgraded to ubuntu 20.04 and am using R 4.02. For some reason I get timeout errors in rapid succession when calling a table.

`> births <- get_cansim("17-10-0016", refresh = TRUE, timeout = 1000)

Accessing CANSIM NDM product 17-10-0016 from Statistics Canada
Got timeout from StatCan, trying again
Got timeout from StatCan, trying again
Got timeout from StatCan, trying again
Got timeout from StatCan, giving up
Error: Problem downloading data, multiple timeouts.
Please check your network connection. If your connections is fine then StatCan servers might be down.`

The error messages are immediate as though I was behind a proxy (I'm not, i'm on my home connection). Interestingly, cancensus works fine. is there a dependency i might be missing?

appreciate any help

mountainMath commented

Not sure, I can't reproduce this on my machine. It could be that StatCan servers were having problems at the time you tried, that does happen at times. If you are still having the same problem, can you check what result the following gives you:

r<-httr::GET("https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/tbl/csv/17100016-eng.zip")
r$status_code
colemanrob commented

strange. i get an error code
`> r<-httr::GET("https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/tbl/csv/17100016-eng.zip")

Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) :
error:1414D172:SSL routines:tls12_check_peer_sigalg:wrong signature type

mountainMath commented

Hmm. That looks like an SSL handshake problem. What OS and what openssl version are you using?

colemanrob commented

ubuntu 20.04, openSSL 1.1.1f (newest version), libcurl4-openssl-dev 7.68.0-1ubuntu2.1 (newest version)

colemanrob commented

just a follow-up; i solved by editing my /etc/ssl/openssl.conf file to include

openssl_conf = default_conf

at the top of the file and

[ default_conf ]

ssl_conf = ssl_sect

[ssl_sect]

system_default = ssl_default_sect

[ssl_default_sect]
MinProtocol = TLSv1.2
CipherString = DEFAULT:@SECLEVEL=1

to the end of the file.

apparently openssl has been upgraded and this behaviour is working as intended - see here

Hope this helps ubuntu users who use your excellent package :)

Cheers

mountainMath commented

Thanks for figuring this out. That's a good stopgap measure, but the core of the problem seems to be StatCan not enabling TLSv1.3. I will let them know of the problem and ask them to upgrade their servers.

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