I'll reply in detail later but wanted to clear up this one point now in case it helps.

I was unable to replicate your results.

$ ping -ncl perlmonks.org
[download]

That's because you've transcribed it instead of copy-and-paste. I haven't used the -l option, I've passed a 1 (the digit one) to the -c option. Of course "l" is a bad number of packets to transmit because it isn't a number. HTH.