Workaround for the Tabpy bug

I've spent the last couple of weeks heads down on the Tabpy bug reported over on our site: https://github.com/tableau/TabPy/issues/106

Essentially, we broke some customers when we rolled out 2018.1 servers.

It took awhile to narrow down the defect.  After a lot of hard debugging, we isolated the cause to servers that had never set a timeout value. The timeout controls how long Tableau will wait for a server response.  Anyway, if that value is not set at all then the server will default to a 0 time.  This causes it to wait no time at all for a response, and then give up when the server does not respond in zero time.

Embarrassing and annoying for sure.  But as we mention on the site, there is a workaround.  Run the tabadmin tool to set a value (directions are in the thread above).

Now that we know the cause of the error, we can start working on a fix.  Stay tuned for that.

Since this has taken almost all my time for the  past two weeks, I wanted to share an update on where we are.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John