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Just a quick note about network connections

I've been working on some new functionality for Vineyard and I needed to test if the user is connected to the internet or not. After some Google scouting I didn't come up with anything that did what I needed so I ended up writing this little function and thought it might be useful for others.

1def test_internet_connection():
2	info = subprocess.Popen(['ifconfig', '-a'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
3	for interface in info.split('nn'):
4		if 'UP BROADCAST RUNNING' in interface and 'inet addr:' in interface:
5			return True
6	return False

Internet connection... Vineyard... what could I be up to? Any guesses (or requests)?