Tool looks like it died whenever a whois lookup fails

[bd808]

When the whois lookup for a given IP fails for whatever reason, the tool will respond in such a way that the Toolforge front proxy thinks the tool is offline. https://whois-dev.toolforge.org/w/127.0.0.1/lookup is an easy way to repeat this behavior.

[whym]

(whois-dev is based on the wsgi branch.)

Thanks for reporting. It gives a 502 (Bad Gateway) error. Maybe that's the reason?

It seems like a bad choice (I don't remember why I chose it a long time ago), but what could be an appropriate error code?

EDIT: I changed it to 500 for now.

[bd808]

The switch to a 500 status is an improvement. The front proxy is no longer replacing your response with a generic error page.

The front proxy config has a comment that indicates its 502 handling should not apply to upstream responses, but that does seem to be what was happening.