Our test suite currently contacts a range of hosts for different "online" tests, including python.org hosts.  This has led to sudden breakages in the past, e.g. when www.python.org changed URLs or switched to https by default.

It would probably a good idea to consolidate as much as possible into accessing a new VM called something like "testsuite.python.org", where the necessary services can be kept running regardless of the necessities of actual python.org services.

First step to do this is to compile a list of tests that could use the VM, and a list of services that need to be running.