in reply to My ping should fail but does not
You have left out the part that seems to be misbehaving. Where does pingecho() come from? What is its documented behavior? What does the code look like? It could be pinging localhost by default, which would (one hopes) return true.
You may want to consider using Net::Ping and/or DBI.
After Compline,
Zaxo
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom