Find out if a host is alive

[Anand Pillai]

I would like to add a feature to one of my network programs.
The requirement is to find out if a server is alive by sending
it requests. I know of the standard ICMP ping, and searched
for python modules able to 'PING'. The only hit I got was Jeremy
Hiltons ping package, written for Python 1.4, and it does not
work with the latest Python versions (2.0 upwards).

Are there other ways of finding out (in a few lines of code)
whether a server is alive, apart from the ICMP protocol?

Thanks for your help.

-Anand