A question about time

[Jan Danielsson]

Hello all,

   I have a list of servers which an application connects to. If the
connection fails, the application should mark the server as temporarily
unavailable, and should try to use the server again after x units of time.

In C, I would do this:

server.invalidUntil = time(NULL) + 5*60; // five minute delay

..and the check:

if(time(NULL) > server.invalidUtil)
{
   // use server
}

So the whole thing very simple... But how do I do that in Python?

   I have found datetime.datetime.now(), but I don't understand what
"format" it returns the time in. I assume it's an object of some sort..
But how do I do if I want the current time as an integer (unix
timestamp) in Python?