You can however make Net::Ping use the external ping utility via the Net::Ping::External module if you want to do ICMP echo without running your script as root.

See the documentation of Net::Ping (note that CPAN has a more recent Net::Ping than the one included with perl 5.8.0)

•Update: It's still odd however that it doesn't work at all.. even when a TCP echo service isn't running on a host (these days it almost never is) it should still get a "connection refused" which it would interpret as "the host is alive since it can refuse the connection".

Is it possible there's a firewall in the way that blocks tcp port 7 (echo) ? Try setting the port to 80 by doing:

$p->{port_num} = 80;
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Yes, that is correct. The ping utility uses ICMP echo request/ICMP echo reply while, by default, Net::Ping tries to establish a TCP session with the echo port of the target host. Try making this change to your program:

$p = Net::Ping->new('icmp');
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Update

w01b0rji.cube.fred.ch `ping` OK : w01b0rji.cube.fred.ch is alive
w01b0rji.cube.fred.ch $p->ping NOK

svmoloch.flur.fred.ch `ping` OK : svmoloch.flur.fred.ch is alive
svmoloch.flur.fred.ch $p->ping NOK

160.69.125.142 `ping` OK : 160.69.125.142 is alive
160.69.125.142 $p->ping NOK
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Just to clarify, what you are seeing here is most likely the result of the specified hosts allowing ICMP echo requests, but not having a service listening to the echo port.

By default Net::Ping uses a different method of determining a host's status (TCP echo) than the 'ping' utility (ICMP echo) because doing ICMP echo on unix systems requires root privileges to open a so-called "raw socket".

It does not take root privileges to create an ICMP echo request... you can test it yourself by logging in as a non-root user and playing with the "ping" program. Maybe you have confused this with putting the network card in promiscuous mode which is required for programs like tcpdump?

Update You know, xmath I never noticed that ping was setuid to root, so that, indeed, was a poor example. *Smiles*

Update 2 Ok, so I went back through all my crafted packet code, and I can not find a single example of being able to craft an ICMP packet without being root. With that said, it does indeed seem that xmath was correct.

you can test it yourself by logging in as a non-root user and playing with the "ping" program

The "ping" utility is always setuid root:

[Quoose:~] xmath% ls -l `which ping`
-r-sr-xr-x    1 root     wheel       24920 Dec 23 15:17 /sbin/ping
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That's why normal users can use it. :-)

Update: it seems that lately raw sockets are no longer needed for ICMP on some platforms (Darwin / Mac OS X); but on most (Linux etc) they still are