Downloading Metadata fails on one machine, works on another

[perler]

Hi,

I have the problem, that I have a new installation of calibre on another notebook with the same library as on the old one, and here downloading metadata fails for every single book whereas on the old one the same book, it works perfectly fine.

the error message:

calibre, version 0.8.22
ERROR: No matches found: <p>Failed to find any books that match your search. Try making the search <b>less specific</b>. For example, use only the author's last name and a single distinctive word from the title.<p>To see the full log, click Show Details.

Starting download
Query: title:The Scarpetta Factor; authors:Patricia Cornwell
Running identify query with parameters:
{u'authors': [u'Patricia Cornwell'], u'identifiers': {}, u'timeout': 30, u'title': u'The Scarpetta Factor'}
Using plugins: Google, Amazon.com, ISBNDB
The log from individual plugins is below

****************************** ISBNDB ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from ISBNDB took 1.5609998703
Failed to make query to ISBNDb, aborting.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\sources\isbndb.py ", line 109, in identify
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\sources\isbndb.py ", line 216, in make_query
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\metadata\sources\isbndb.py ", line 155, in parse_feed
ValueError: ISBNDb query failed:

************************************************** ******************************

****************************** Google ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Google took 1.43700003624

************************************************** ******************************

****************************** Amazon.com ******************************
Request extra headers: [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.78 Safari/532.5')]
Found 0 results
Downloading from Amazon.com took 22.4679999352
Trying alternate results page markup
No matches found with query: u'http://www.amazon.com/s/?sort=relevanceexprank&field-author=Patricia+Cornwell&field-title=Scarpetta+Factor&search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1'

************************************************** ******************************
The identify phase took 22.73 seconds
The longest time (22.468000) was taken by: Amazon.com
Merging results from different sources and finding earliest publication dates from the xisbn service
We have 0 merged results, merging took: 0.00 seconds

I suspect a network problem, but both notebooks are on the same LAN. I checked the proxy settings in IE without success (ok, it took a bit longer to come to the error message above, so something changed..)

PAT

[kovidgoyal]

Go to Preferences->Miscellaneous and check the proxy setting being used by calibre.

[perler]

There are no proxies used (on both notebooks). but we figured it out, for whoever uses unblock-us.com too, that's what preventing the access to the lookup sites.

to solve this problem I would like to use a proxy just for calibre. any chance?

[kovidgoyal]

If you set a system proxy, calibre will use it automatically.

[perler]

that's a bit too intrusive for the whole system, but does the "system proxy" mean "just for internet explorer"? if not, would you consider implementing a setting or tweak where we can advice calibre explicitely to use one particular proxy (ans I think this would avoid a lot of confusion anyways, as it is just not clear, that calibre is using some general windows settings for this kind of stuff)

[kovidgoyal]

On windows, it is the roxy set for internet explorer. Alternatively, you can set the http_proxy environment variable, calibre will use that automatically.