Sorry: my comments here should have gone under Reaped: Testing the network connection, as this thread may be deleted. I was slow in parsing turnstep's instructions.

Your program has been critiqued regarding the virtues of ICMP over HTTP as the protocol for testing connectivity. As correct as that point is, I think folks should keep in mind that your program provides a naive benchmark that answers a non-technical complaint thatyou got from your boss. He wanted to know "What's wrong with our stupid ISP? Yahoo! is slow as molasses today."

Together with traceroute|tracert your program provides triangulation for answering your boss's question, and lays it out in a compelling snapshot. I would bet that if you combine the output of traceroute into your program, you will have answered your boss's content and performance question more to his satisfaction than if you had only tested connectivity. Put a button on his "Active Desktop" and he'll push it several times each day, I would guess.

For my criticisms, mostly opinions, consider:

1.   CGI does write all of the tags that you put into your script. I think you should use it fully - so that all improvements to CGI will be automatically written into your program.
2.   You've made a good choice dividing the program into two, in my opinion. But, the advantages of doing so are lost when you hard-code the data. Separate out the data into an initialization file, or collect it from a form. (Update to clarify: at very least, pass the array  @sites rather than cut and paste it.)
3.   in my opinion it's better to write your  open || die statement as

         open INFILE,"$datafile" or die
             "Cannot open $datafile :$!";
   [download]

   The perlops  || and  or are identical in their short-circuit behavior, but the latter has the advantage of being more legible and having a much lower precedence (notice that it can even be used without parentheses preceding). In my opinion it's better suited to the open() test. I think it belongs in our perl vocabulary, for these reasons.

Thanks for posting your program, cajun.
mkmcconn