detecting network

I'm looking for ways to detect:

1. whether the network is up (a way that is more elegant than parsing "c:shownetstatus" output)

2. if the network has a connectivity with the outside world (tcpip stack can be up but the connectivity is inside LAN only, I want to detect this scenario to prevent unecessary connection that would fail).

The programming language is AREXX, but network access is done using python scripts.
A brief google-ing on detecting network inside python didn't reveal anything useful

Does anyone has some ideas?

TIA,
Jack

@Jack

Quote:

I don't think there is a generic solution for that other than to connect to a site on the internet and see if the connection fails (which is what you explicitly didn't want).

You would have to connect to the router and ask for its online/offline status. This is a router-specific solution and you cannot support all known and unknown routers in the world.

Bye,
Thomas

@thomas

I would just try and resolve example.com

@thomas

Quote:

Not good. I want a generic solution for program that goes public. If I don't, some python script that participate in the program throw out ugly stuff.
Maybe I'll settle to "python *>NIL:" or somthing

Thanks anyway
Jack

@xeron

Quote:

I'll see if it is quiet enough and doesn't implies any unreasonable delays.

Thanks.
Jack

Meanwhile "python *>NIL:" takes care of the ugly err messages when network is down or local only.
Still will have to produce a more clean solution...

Jack