Google App Engine says “Must authenticate first.”

Question

Google App Engine says "Must authenticate first." while trying to deploy any app:

me@myhost /opt/google_appengine $ python appcfg.py update ~/sda2/workspace/lyapapam/

Application: lyapapam; version: 1.
Server: appengine.google.com.
Scanning files on local disk.
Scanned 500 files.
Scanned 1000 files.
Initiating update.
Email: <email_here>@gmail.com
Password for <email_here>@gmail.com: 
Error 401: --- begin server output ---
Must authenticate first.
--- end server output ---

We are getting this message with any application and under any developer account available to us

That's what we have installed:

Python - 2.5.5         App Engine SDK - 1.3.2
PIL    - 1.1.7         ssl            - 1.15

How can I fix it? Is it well known problem?

Update:

I really had a problems with time synchronization immediately after installing Windows on the same computer where I have Gentoo installed, but I've fixed that soon by setting RealTimeIsUniversal in registry and setting synchronization with europe.pool.ntp.org in both systems. (BTW my time zone is EEST)

A couple of days after I solved a problem with time synchronization appcfg.py asked me for a password after each line it printed out (that was really weird) and I've used --passin and unix 'yes '.

Now I have this problem with "Must authenticate first." and I've spent a lot of time playing with --passin --insecure --no_cookies options in different combinations on both windows and linux without any success.

Answer 1

it is very likely that, say you have account(s) that are in good standing, that the clock on your system is set incorrectly. this causes such authentication failures that you got.

here's a related post from last summer outlining this exact problem (and solution): http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python/browse_thread/thread/a57fc866838b0b32

if your clock is correct, and you think you may have other issues, reach out to the Google App Engine developer forum for assistance: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-python

Answer 2

It should prompt for your user and password. Are you running this from a script?

If so, you can use the option: --passin

If given, the tool accepts the Google account password in stdin instead of prompting for it interactively. This allows you to invoke the tool from a script without putting your password on the command line.

Source

Answer 3

This is also the same error message displayed some times when your password has special characters in it, like a $.