I doubt it's a hardware issue... If these people have any knowledge of computers, they would try connecting to other places to see if it gives them the same error. It sounds obvious, but have them ping your DNS alias as well as your IP address.
If they can't get anywhere else, then it's a local hardware issue to them. If they can, run a traceroute program from them to you (or vica-verca if you can) to see where the connection is halting. It may be a hardware issue local to you. Do you have other clients with the same problem? Can you ping them from your server? These are all questions you should be using to troubleshoot. If you can ping to/from client/server then this certainly isn't a network hardware issue. And if it was connecting, but blocking a specific port then your ICMP response would say that rather than "timed out." My suggestion to you is get an answer to these questions and post back here. You should have done this before ever even thinking about looking at the source code. If you did, you should have posted the results. It sounds to me like they just don't have the correct hostname (or their DNS service is down). Again, this could be seen from answering the above questions. G/L Jay -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
