but the 'expect' gives you more details about the failure... read the documentation on telnet objects here: "http://docs.python.org/lib/telnet-objects.html";. It says this specifically: "If end of file is found and no text was read, raise EOFError. Otherwise, when nothing matches, return (-1, None, text) where text is the text received so far (may be the empty string if a timeout happened). "
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