Last time I tested Net::Ping it crashed on me sometimes, so I had to roll my own.

Update: This node is causing me some --, so perhaps I should explain myself. I used the Net::Ping in a script that built a tree of DNSinformation to make sure a DNS server was alive before I fetched data from it (this was an internal network), and I experienced problems with the Net::Ping module, that caused the program to abort and/or fail to report correctly if the server responded or not. I don't remember anything more, this was 2 years ago, and I didn't file a bug report on it. Perhaps it's better now.