Improve error msg when key-fetch fails (#5896)

There's no point doing a raise_from here, because the exception is always
logged at warn with no stacktrace in the caller. Instead, let's try to give
better messages to reduce confusion.

In particular, this means that we won't log 'Failed to connect to remote
server' when we don't even attempt to connect to the remote server due to
blacklisting.

2 files changed, 8 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/changelog.d/5896.misc b/changelog.d/5896.misc
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..ed47c747bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/changelog.d/5896.misc
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Improve the logging when we have an error when fetching signing keys.
diff --git a/synapse/crypto/keyring.py b/synapse/crypto/keyring.py
index 6c3e885e72..654accc843 100644
--- a/synapse/crypto/keyring.py
+++ b/synapse/crypto/keyring.py
@@ -18,7 +18,6 @@ import logging
 from collections import defaultdict
 
 import six
-from six import raise_from
 from six.moves import urllib
 
 import attr
@@ -657,9 +656,10 @@ class PerspectivesKeyFetcher(BaseV2KeyFetcher):
                 },
             )
         except (NotRetryingDestination, RequestSendFailed) as e:
-            raise_from(KeyLookupError("Failed to connect to remote server"), e)
+            # these both have str() representations which we can't really improve upon
+            raise KeyLookupError(str(e))
         except HttpResponseException as e:
-            raise_from(KeyLookupError("Remote server returned an error"), e)
+            raise KeyLookupError("Remote server returned an error: %s" % (e,))
 
         keys = {}
         added_keys = []
@@ -821,9 +821,11 @@ class ServerKeyFetcher(BaseV2KeyFetcher):
                     timeout=10000,
                 )
             except (NotRetryingDestination, RequestSendFailed) as e:
-                raise_from(KeyLookupError("Failed to connect to remote server"), e)
+                # these both have str() representations which we can't really improve
+                # upon
+                raise KeyLookupError(str(e))
             except HttpResponseException as e:
-                raise_from(KeyLookupError("Remote server returned an error"), e)
+                raise KeyLookupError("Remote server returned an error: %s" % (e,))
 
             if response["server_name"] != server_name:
                 raise KeyLookupError(