Description of problem:
The RHN site and XMLRPC site was down this morning for what felt like
15 minutes. It so happens I was attempting to register a RH WS EL3 U4
at the same time.

When I attempted to call rhnreg_ks, it blew up in an unfriendly manner.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Hard to tell, rhnreg_ks doesn't seem to have a version.

# rhnreg_ks --version
Red Hat Network Registration Agent (Kickstart Version) v@VERSION@
Copyright (c) 1999-2002 Red Hat, Inc.
Licensed under terms of the GPL.

How reproducible:

I don't kow what was really going on under the hood, however I have
(in the past) tested changing up2date serverURL to something bogus and
rhnreg_ks seemed to act in a reasonable manner.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Wait until XMLRPC is unavailable or overloaded?
2. Attempt to RHN Channel register with rhnreg_ks
3.
  
Actual results:

When calling rhnreg_ks the following unpleasantness was displayed
after a 1 minute timeout:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks", line 357, in ?
    main()
  File "/usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks", line 314, in main
    other = other)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rhnreg.py", line 331, in
registerSystem
    auth_dict)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rpcServer.py", line 308, in doCall
    ret = apply(method, args, kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/xmlrpclib.py", line 821, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/rpcServer.py", line 51, in _request1
    ret = self._request(methodname, params)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/rhn/rpclib.py", line 308, in
_request
    verbose=self._verbose
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/rhn/transports.py", line 168,
in request
    headers, fd = req.send_http(host, handler)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/rhn/transports.py", line 697,
in send_http
    response = self._connection.getresponse()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/rhn/connections.py", line
143, in getresponse
    response.begin()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/httplib.py", line 269, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/httplib.py", line 231, in _read_status
    line = self.fp.readline()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/rhn/SSL.py", line 248, in
readline
    data = self._connection.recv(bufsize)
SSL.SysCallError: (-1, 'Unexpected EOF')

Expected results:

I expect rhnreg_ks is report an error gracefully, much like the other
XMLRPC returned errors. (such as unavailable licenses, etc...) I know
this is a client side error, not a server side, but the output should
be similar.

Additional info: