EPG123 Server proxy disable SD access

[Space]

Gary,

My current Schedules Direct service has expired, and I have not yet renewed, but hope to be able to before my guide listings run out.

But here is my question and perhaps a request for a new feature...

When my account expired, I disabled the daily update in the Task Scheduler, I did this so that the SD server would not be getting hit daily with a useless connection, but also to prevent SD from potentially blocking my IP address for 48 hours as explained in the faq:

[A]ttempting to download data with an expired account more than 10 times in a two hour period will block you for 48 hours.

My question is will the attempted download of the poster art from the SD server by the EPG123 proxy service trigger this 48 hour block?

I currently see the "401 Unauthorized" counter increase whenever WMC tries to download poster art, so I don't think I am blocked, but I don't know if this will eventually result in a 48 hour block.

Even if SD does not currently block your IP address in this situation, I assume they may implement it eventually, so this leads me to the new feature request...

If the EPG123 proxy server determines that the account is expired, or perhaps if you are unable to refresh the token (which is the last message that was logged to the server.log):

Failed to refresh token upon receiving an UNKNOWN_USER (5004) error code.

make the EPG123 proxy server stop attempting to access the SD server until a new token is available in the registry (there was a successful guide update). In this way you can continue to use the cached images in the EPG123 proxy service without having it unnecessarily connect to the SD service and potentially causing an IP block for 48 hours.

Perhaps you should try a few times to refresh the token before you disable access to SD (in case of intermittent problems), but I'll leave that to you to determine if it is necessary. Once the EPG123 proxy service decides to no longer connect to SD, it should not connect or try to renew the token until it sees that the token in the registry has been updated, which would mean there was a successful guide update by EPG123. It may be OK for the proxy to attempt to renew the token at some long interval (every 6/12/24 hours?) if it is felt that it will not burden the SD server (or cause a 48 hour block) to do so.

When I am eventually able to renew the SD service, I'd like to avoid potentially having to wait another 48 hours to be able to download listings...

Thanks!

[garyan2]

Not a problem, and a good idea. I'll only request from SD if there is a valid token. When the service is started, it assumes the token is valid but will quickly determine it is not after the first request to SD. If the account is renewed, all it will take to get the service back to contacting SD will be to successfully login to SD and getting a new token.

[Space]

Yeah, I don't completely understand how it works but I was thinking that the proxy can just keep track of the last used token that resulted in a failure and subsequent inability to refresh the token.

From then on, if it needs to access SD, it would check this token against the one currently in the registry, and if they match, continue to not access SD. If the token in the registry is different, then you can attempt to access SD again (as it's assumed that a guide update was able to successfully log in and updated the token in the registry).

This is assuming that the token in the registry does not get updated/changed unless there is a successful login to SD and the account's access to guide data has not expired.