503 downloading earth wallpaper from Die.net

[Andras Vasaros]

Since a couple of weeks World Sunlight Map doesn't change the wallpaper. I'm using:

Fedora 29
Gnome 3.30.2
Python 3.7
variety 0.7.1

Possible root causes:

1. Rather unlikely that something went wrong in the Python download scripts without major update on Python and without update on variety.

2. Die.net changed something on their static.die.net server, the URL https://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg works fine in my browser, but varierty (stated with variety -vvv) says this:

DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,187: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Entering function: download_one (line 37 in /usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/EarthDownloader.py) - not tracing further because MAX_NONTARGET_DEPTH=1'
INFO: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,187: download_one() 'Downloading world sunlight map from https://www.die.net/earth/'
INFO: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,188: save_locally() 'Origin URL: https://www.die.net/earth/'
INFO: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,190: save_locally() 'Image URL: https://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg'
INFO: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,191: save_locally() 'Local name: /home/anv/.config/variety/Downloaded/Earth/1600.jpg'
INFO: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,645: save_locally() 'Download failed from image URL: https://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg (source location: https://www.die.net/earth/) '
DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,646: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Leaving function: download_one_from (line 1018 in /usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/VarietyWindow.py)'
DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,646: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Entering function: exception (line 1364 in /usr/lib64/python3.7/logging/__init__.py) - not tracing further because MAX_NONTARGET_DEPTH=1'
DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,646: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Entering function: <lambda> (line 994 in /usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/VarietyWindow.py)'
DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,646: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Leaving function: <lambda> (line 994 in /usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/VarietyWindow.py)'
DEBUG: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,647: profiler() '[Thread-4] -> Entering function: makeRecord (line 1431 in /usr/lib64/python3.7/logging/__init__.py) - not tracing further because MAX_NONTARGET_DEPTH=1'
ERROR: 2019-01-12 08:21:10,647: download_thread() 'Could not download wallpaper:'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/VarietyWindow.py", line 986, in download_thread
    self.download_one_from(downloader)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/VarietyWindow.py", line 1018, in download_one_from
    file = downloader.download_one()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/EarthDownloader.py", line 39, in download_one
    downloaded = self.save_locally(self.location, EARTH_IMAGE_URL, force_download=True, extra_metadata={'headline': 'World Sunlight Map'})
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/Downloader.py", line 117, in save_locally
    raise e
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/Downloader.py", line 112, in save_locally
    r = Util.request(image_url, stream=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/variety/Util.py", line 569, in request
    r.raise_for_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/models.py", line 940, in raise_for_status
    raise HTTPError(http_error_msg, response=self)
requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 503 Server Error: Service Temporarily Unavailable for url: https://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg

[James Lu (jlu5)]

Related with possible workaround: https://github.com/varietywalls/variety/issues/119. It seems that die.net sometimes enables Cloudflare DDoS protection, which essentially blocks all automated clients from downloading things.

Let's consolidate this report with the new issue tracker.

[Stefan Belishki (belishki)]

Same issue for me in Ubuntu 20.04.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Closed, won't fix, read here: https://github.com/varietywalls/variety/issues/296