Hey folks,
I’m hitting a weird wall with our Python integration script. We’ve got a service that polls /api/v2/architect/schedules every minute to sync shift data. Everything works fine for the first 55 minutes, then boom. I start getting 401 Unauthorized errors.
The weird part? I have a refresh token handler in place. The script catches the 401, calls the OAuth2 token endpoint, gets a shiny new access_token and refresh_token back, updates the local storage, and then retries the original request. The retry still fails with a 401.
Here’s the kicker. If I take that newly generated access token, paste it into Postman, and run the same request, it works perfectly. The token is valid. The scope is correct. It’s just the script that’s getting rejected.
I’m running this on an EC2 instance in us-west-2. Genesys Cloud is obviously in the cloud. I noticed in the logs that the exp claim in the JWT is exactly 3600 seconds from the iat. But the error happens right at the 55-minute mark, not 60. This makes me suspect clock skew. The server time might be slightly ahead of Genesys’s auth server, causing the token to be considered expired on their end before the script thinks it is. Or maybe the refresh process itself is taking too long and the old token expires during the handshake?
Here’s the relevant snippet from my requests session:
import requests
from datetime import datetime
def fetch_data(url, token):
headers = {'Authorization': f'Bearer {token}'}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
if response.status_code == 401:
print(f"Token expired at {datetime.now()}. Refreshing...")
new_token = refresh_oauth_token()
headers['Authorization'] = f'Bearer {new_token}'
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
return response
I’ve checked the system time on the EC2 instance using timedatectl and it looks synced. But I’m wondering if there’s a known threshold for clock skew in Genesys auth? Should I be adding a safety buffer to the token expiration check before the refresh? Or is this a bug in how the Python requests library handles the retry timing?
Any ideas on how to debug the exact millisecond the auth server rejects the token?