Python OAuth Twitter feed behaves differently on two equally configured machines

Question

I have the same coding code to work with a stream of Twitter users running on two different machines. Both Ubuntu Lucid machines use python 2.6.5, but on a machine in my house I get HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized , while at university it works fine. On both machines, it works fine when I use curl with the same parameters, that is, the consumer key, consumer secret, access token and access key.

Check out the code below, it was created by Josh Sharp

 from oauth.oauth import OAuthRequest, OAuthSignatureMethod_HMAC_SHA1 from hashlib import md5 import json, time import random, math, re, urllib, urllib2 STREAM_URL = "https://userstream.twitter.com/2/user.json" class Token(object): def __init__(self,key,secret): self.key = key self.secret = secret def _generate_nonce(self): random_number = ''.join(str(random.randint(0, 9)) for i in range(40)) m = md5(str(time.time()) + str(random_number)) return m.hexdigest() CONSUMER_KEY = 'consumer_key' CONSUMER_SECRET = 'consumer_secret' ACCESS_TOKEN = 'token' ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = 'token_secret' access_token = Token(ACCESS_TOKEN,ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET) consumer = Token(CONSUMER_KEY,CONSUMER_SECRET) parameters = { 'oauth_consumer_key': CONSUMER_KEY, 'oauth_token': access_token.key, 'oauth_signature_method': 'HMAC-SHA1', 'oauth_timestamp': str(int(time.time())), 'oauth_nonce': access_token._generate_nonce(), 'oauth_version': '1.0', } oauth_request = OAuthRequest.from_token_and_callback(access_token, http_url=STREAM_URL, parameters=parameters) signature_method = OAuthSignatureMethod_HMAC_SHA1() signature = signature_method.build_signature(oauth_request, consumer, access_token) parameters['oauth_signature'] = signature data = urllib.urlencode(parameters) req = urllib2.urlopen("%s?%s" % (STREAM_URL,data)) buffer = '' # We're using urllib2 to avoid external dependencies # even though pyCurl actually handles the callbacks # much more gracefully than this clumsy method. # We read a byte at a time until we find a newline # which indicates the end of a chunk. while True: chunk = req.read(1) if not chunk: print buffer break chunk = unicode(chunk) buffer += chunk tweets = buffer.split("\n",1) if len(tweets) > 1: print tweets[0] buffer = tweets[1] 

Error trying to run at home:

 File "py_stream.py", line 48, in <module> req = urllib2.urlopen("%s?%s" % (STREAM_URL,data)) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen return _opener.open(url, data, timeout) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 397, in open response = meth(req, response) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 510, in http_response 'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 435, in error return self._call_chain(*args) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 369, in _call_chain result = func(*args) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 518, in http_error_default raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp) urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized 

Since it works using curl on both machines, I suppose nothing happened with SSL certification. But at the same time, it makes me wonder what fails when I use it at home.

Answer 1

After many weeks trying to find what the problem was, I found that the clock was not well synchronized with the person in charge of the Twitter stream. And therefore, Twitter returns 401: Unauthorized.

If you are using Ubuntu, you can solve this problem using ntpdate as follows:

 sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com