You might be running into the problem that icmp pings must be run as root. Try 'tcp' instead of 'icmp'. Also, don't you need a port to ping?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::Ping;

#tcp dosn't require root privileges
my $p = Net::Ping->new('tcp');
$p->tcp_service_check(1);

my $host = "192.168.0.1";
my $port = 80;

$p->{'port_num'} = $port;
print "The service on $host port $port is ",
       ($p->ping($host) ? "up" : "down"), ".\n";
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