TA debugging online submissions

From 6.034 Wiki

This is a page of commonly encountered errors related to the online tester.

"Error: Either your key.py file is out of date, or online tests for lab0 are not currently available"

This is usually caused by an out-of-date key.py file, which is sometimes a result of the student changing their Athena password. However, if you believe it might be a server error or something more complicated, ask the student comment out the except block in tester.py starting with except xmlrpclib.Fault: (for Lab 0, this is lines 250-254 of tester.py), then try submitting again. This should result in an error traceback (printed in the command line). The end of the error traceback should say something like:

• "<class 'tester.test.testutils.AuthenticationFailure'>:Error: invalid username or password.  Please make sure your key.py file is up-to-date."

This indicates an authentication problem, which could be caused by:

• out-of-date key.py due to student changing their password
• out-of-date key.py due to student using an expired certificate
• the database was reset, invalidating all previous key.py files (this should only happen when the database is cleared, which is unlikely to occur during a semester)

• "<class 'tester.test.models.DoesNotExist'>:Lab matching query does not exist."

This means the server is not currently accepting submissions. This is probably a Django database issue (the "lab" object (e.g. "lab0") is missing in the database).