Python3 CGI HTTPS server fails on Unix

Question

This Python3 CGI HTTPS server used to work a few weeks (or months) ago, but now no longer works under Linux (Ubuntu). I tried on Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 and the behavi

Answer 1

Although the OP found the solution already, here are a few more details why it behaves that way:

• Plain sockets are kernel only, but sslwraped sockets put an additional user-space layer on top.
• http.server does a fork (on platforms supporting fork, that is not on windows) and a remapping of the file descriptors to stdin/stdout before finally executing the cgi program. This way the executed program works on the plain (kernel only, no ssl) file descriptors
• All writes of the program thus go directly to the kernel socket, that is plain unencrypted data.
• The peer will croak on this plain data because it expects SSL frames. The kind of error it produces depends on the data it gets, e.g. ssl_error_rx_record_too_long or "wrong version number" or something like this.