how to handle network failures

[harryos]

hi
I  am trying to write a DataGrabber which reads some data from given
url..I made DataGrabber as a Thread and want to wait for some interval
of time in case there is a network failure that prevents read().
I am not very sure how to implement this

class DataGrabber(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self,url):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.url=url
    def run(self):
        data=self.get_page_data()
        process_data(data)

    def get_page_data():
        try:
            f=urllib.urlopen(self.url)
            data=f.read(1024)
        except IOError:
            #wait for some time and try again
            time.sleep(120)
            data=self.get_page_data()
        return data

Is this the way to  implement the part where the thread waits and
reads the  data again? Will this handle network failures?Can somebody
please help?

thanks
harry