With Net::Ping, 1 is returned if the host is reachable and 0 if it is not. It doesn't actually ever return the ping time, so it's not useful for determining "how far away" the host is.

Also, Net::Ping will happily block will it's trying to reach the target host, so even if we wanted only to know if the host is up, we'd still have to fork.

You're right, though, about turning to CPAN first, and I agree. Unfortunately, I tried it and found that it wouldn't do what was needed.