Identical Error Codes

I use python 2.4.1 on Linux, and a python package written inside the company I work in, for establishing a connection between 2 hosts for test purposes. Upon establishing the conne

Solution 1:

It appears Python is exposing the error code from the OS - the interpretation of the code is OS-dependent.

111 is ECONNREFUSED on many Linux systems, and on Cygwin.

146 is ECONNREFUSED on Solaris.

10061 is WSAECONNREFUSED in winerror.h - it's the Windows Socket API's version of ECONNREFUSED.

No doubt on other systems, it's different again.

The correct way to handle this is use symbolic comparisons based on the OS's definition of ECONNREFUSED; that's the way you do it in C, for example. In other words, have a constant called ECONNREFUSED that has the value of ECONNREFUSED for that platform, in a platform-specific library (which will be necessary to link to the OS's socket primitives in any case), and compare error codes with the ECONNREFUSED constant, rather than magic numbers.

I don't know what Python's standard approach to OS error codes is. I suspect it's not terribly well thought out.