+### Thierry - 23 Sept 2014
+# regardless of this being shipped on lxc-only or on all nodes,
+# it is safer to check for the availability of the ovs-vsctl command and just print
+# out a warning when it's not there, instead of a nasty traceback
+def ovs_available ():
+ "return True if ovs-vsctl can be run"
+ try:
+ child = subprocess.Popen (['ovs-ovsctl', '--help'])
+ child.communicate()
+ return True
+ except:
+ return False
+