If Tom's suggestion still doesn't work for you.. you will have to read the fine print which tells you that the module has to be run as root (or administrator if you are on Win32), so add some error checking. If you are on Win32, you can use Win32::PingICMP to do the same thing without administrator rights. If you need to do this via a CGI script... then you will have to set up your web server to run the script with admin/root privs... :-) you can also just use backticks and grab the output yourself and parse it yourself... my $ping = `ping 127.0.0.1`; Don't re-invent the wheel, there are a ton of posts on this... do a search in here... JamesNC