APIs and automation on errno

curl exits 3 on a Jenkins API call: square brackets in tree= are not URL-safe

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

I was automating a build trigger against a Jenkins controller from a shell script: start a parameterised job, then follow the queue item until it turns into a real build. The queries worked perfectly when I pasted them into a browser with my session cookie. From the shell, the same URL produced nothing at all:

$ curl -u ci-user:$JENKINS_TOKEN "$JENKINS/queue/item/42/api/json?tree=executable[number]"
curl: (3) bad range in URL position 45:
https://ci.example.com/queue/item/42/api/json?tree=executable[number]
 ^
$ echo $?
3

Every nested tree= expression behaved the same way. Listing a job’s parameter definitions:

MCP server dies at startup after the mcp package resolves to 2.0.0

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

Two stdio MCP servers that had worked for weeks stopped appearing in the client. No tools, no error dialog — the server process simply exits during startup, and the client shows it as failed to connect. Running it by hand shows why:

AttributeError: 'Server' object has no attribute 'list_tools'

Nothing in the project changed. That is the tell.

Cause: an unpinned SDK and a fresh resolution

The server’s dependency spec was permissive:

mcp>=0.9.0

uv re-resolves on each run when there is no lock file in play, and the newest release satisfying that range became 2.0.0, which removed the decorator-style Server.list_tools() API the server was written against. The code is fine; it is simply talking to a different major version than the one it was built for.

gpsoauth returns BadAuthentication on a 2FA Google account (app passwords do not help)

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

Getting a master token for a library that speaks Google’s mobile auth protocol (in my case gkeepapi for Google Keep) starts with gpsoauth. On an account with 2FA enabled it fails:

>>> import gpsoauth
>>> gpsoauth.perform_master_login("me@gmail.com", "…", android_id)
{'Error': 'BadAuthentication', 'ErrorDetail': ''}

The reflex is to generate an app password and retry. It fails the same way. App passwords work for IMAP/SMTP, not for this endpoint, so no amount of retrying the password path will produce a token.

Graylog 7 API: POST /api/streams returns 400 "entity cannot be null"

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

A stream-creation call that worked against Graylog 6 now fails:

$ curl -sS -u "$USER:$PASS" -H 'X-Requested-By: cli' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 -d '{"title":"nginx","description":"nginx access logs","remove_matches_from_default_stream":false}' \
 https://graylog.example.com/api/streams

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
{"type":"ApiError","message":"entity cannot be null"}

Nothing in the message points at the payload shape, so the natural assumption — a missing required field such as index_set_id — sends you down the wrong path.

Cause

In Graylog 7 the endpoint takes a CreateEntityRequest: the stream itself moved one level down, under an entity key. Send the same fields wrapped:

MusicBrainz ws/2 returns 503 "currently busy", and the track lengths you need are often missing

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

I was matching a local album against an online release to recover a correct tracklist — order, titles and durations — so a media library could be tagged from something better than filenames. The first half of that job is a lookup against the MusicBrainz web service, and it kept dying:

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable

The body is a short page saying the service is currently busy and to try again later. Nothing else: no 429, no Retry-After header worth trusting, no hint about which part of the query was expensive. The failure is not correlated with how long the script has been running either — it hits the very first request of a batch as happily as the tenth.

Teams incoming webhook returns HTTP 200 but no message appears

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

A monitoring or automation job posts to a Teams incoming webhook. The client is happy:

$ curl -sS -i -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 -d '{"text":"certificate renewed"}' \
 'https://example.webhook.office.com/webhookb2/…'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

acme.sh reports send success. Nothing arrives in the channel. No error, no bounce, no entry anywhere.

The proof is in the response headers

Look past the status line:

x-nanoproxy: 1
x-proxyerrorhresult: 0x80070036
x-proxyerrormessage: The network is busy.

That is not a transient condition despite what it says. Microsoft retired Office 365 connectors, and the endpoints now answer 200 at a proxy while discarding the payload. Any client that only checks the status code will report success forever, which is why this failure survives in cron jobs and alerting scripts for months.

Reading and writing MediaWiki pages from a script: action=raw and the two-token login

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reading: skip the HTML, ask for raw wikitext

Fetching an article URL with a normal client and parsing the HTML is where most scripts start, and it goes wrong in a way that is easy to miss: a plain GET of the page URL can land you on Recent Changes instead of the article — a redirect that a browser resolves invisibly but that leaves your parser looking at completely different content and “working”.

Redmine REST: POST /uploads.json returns 404, and the API key only works in the query string

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Symptom

Attaching a file to a Redmine issue over REST is documented as a two-step dance. First you push the raw bytes to /uploads.json, which answers with a token. Then you create or update the issue and reference that token in an uploads array. Step two is the interesting one, so that is where I expected trouble. Step one never got that far:

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' \
 -X POST "https://redmine.example.com/uploads.json?key=<API_KEY>" \
 -H 'Content-Type: application/octet-stream' \
 --data-binary @report.pdf

Not 401, not 403, not 422 — 404. And since every attachment upload in the REST API starts by obtaining a token from exactly this endpoint, that single status code means there is no way to attach a file to an issue through the API on this instance. Not a harder way, not a slower way: none.