Checking for network connectivity

[felciano]

Hi --

Is there a clean pythonic way to check for network connectivity? I
have a script that needs to run periodically on a laptop to create a
local cache of some network files. I would like it to fail gracefully
when disconnected, as well as issue a warning if it hasn't been able
to connect for X minutes / hours.

I currently just use try / except to catch the network errors when the
first call times out, but the timeout takes a while, and this doesn't
feel like the right design because technically this isn't an exception
-- it is expected behavior. Is there a better way to do this (and
still be reasonably portable)?

Thanks,

Ramon