xmlrpclib, testing server presence

[rocco.rossi at gmail.com]

I'm employing xmlrpclib for a project at work, and I must say that I'm
quite impressed with its effectiveness and ease of use.

However, I was recently doing some tests when I realized that if the
server was down, the client quite simply hanged (no use of "try ...
except" here) with no error or tracebacks or exceptions whatsoever.

Is there some way in Python of "testing" the presence of the server on
the other end, so as to avoid this situation?

Thank you.