From what you write, I'm not sure whether your test code above always reports that the host is down or that it's up, but when I tried this myself, I found that Net::Ping doesn't seem to work when $host is specified as v127.0.0.1; setting it to "localhost" works, though, so you might want to try that. Outside of that, you might also consider asking a new question in Seekers of Perl Wisdom about this; I'm sure you'd get more replies that way. :)

--
mowgli