Testing socket connection in Python

You can use the function connect_ex. It doesn't throw an exception. Instead of that, returns a C style integer value (referred to as errno in C):

s =  socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
result = s.connect_ex((host, port))
s.close()
if result:
    print "problem with socket!"
else:
    print "everything it's ok!"

It seems that you catch not the exception you wanna catch out there :)

if the s is a socket.socket() object, then the right way to call .connect would be:

import socket
s = socket.socket()
address = '127.0.0.1'
port = 80  # port number is a number, not string
try:
    s.connect((address, port)) 
    # originally, it was 
    # except Exception, e: 
    # but this syntax is not supported anymore. 
except Exception as e: 
    print("something's wrong with %s:%d. Exception is %s" % (address, port, e))
finally:
    s.close()

Always try to see what kind of exception is what you're catching in a try-except loop.

You can check what types of exceptions in a socket module represent what kind of errors (timeout, unable to resolve address, etc) and make separate except statement for each one of them - this way you'll be able to react differently for different kind of problems.