Sample RPC API code (python) doesn't work

[achacey]

I've been running this for ages on some ancient ASICs and it's been great. Just for fun, nothing serious. I finally got around to poking at the RPC API just to maybe get some metrics out of it for Prometheus or something, and I'm noticing it doesn't seem to work. I made a couple small changes to the supplied python code (changed the exception syntax, and encoded the command string to bytes for the send function). It sends the command and the other side just disconnects with no response.
It's possible I'm just dumb and it works fine for everyone else, and I know this isn't exactly an active project, but if anyone has any thoughts as to how to get the RPC to respond, that would be awesome.
Of course, I have api-listen on, I've tried with and without 127.0.0.1 explicitly allowed. It's all local to the machine, nothing over the actual network.
Thanks!