#The default timeout on my machine is 120 seconds.
#Perhaps you are not waiting long enough for socket.connect() to return (or timeout)?
#You can try reducing the timeout like this:
import socket
s = socket.socket()
s.settimeout(5) # 5 seconds
try:
s.connect(('123.123.123.123', 12345)) # "random" IP address and port
except socket.error, exc:
print "Caught exception socket.error : %s" % exc
#Note that if a timeout is explicitly set for the socket,
#the exception will be socket.
#timeout which is derived from socket.error
#and will therefore be caught by the above except clause.