socket.timeout: timed out

[DanielGraham]

Hello everyone, I'm a newbie to Python programming and I've really fallen in love with the language; although I've got some little qualms right now.

While reading the book "Violent Python A Cookbook for Hackers, Forensic Analysts, Penetration Testers and Security Engineers", I came across this piece of code:

 import socket
 socket.setdefaulttimeout(2)
s = socket.socket()
 s.connect(("192.168.95.148",21))
 ans = s.recv(1024)
 print ans

When I typed it into the python console on Unix: I got this error message:

Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 228, in meth
    return getattr(self._sock,name)(*args)
socket.timeout: timed out

So I carried out some research online for a solution or an explanation to what is going on. But I didn't find any that was convincing. For example, I were asked to modify that code to look like this:

import socket

try:
	s = socket.socket()
	s.settimeout(10)
	s.connect((192.168.95.148", 21))
	ans = s.recv(1024)
	print ans
	s.shutdown(1)
	s.close()
	
except socket.error as socketerror:
	print("Error: ", socketerror)
except socket.timeout:
	print("NO RESPONSE")

After running that one, I get this other error message:

Error:
('Error: ', timeout('timed out',))

So, please if anyone could explain what this error messages actually mean and help me understand how I could fix that, I would be very grateful.