http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=42638


in reply to Net::Ping troubles

Doing TCP or UDP pings is often useless since most machines (at least these days) don't service the TCP/UDP echo services. This type of "ping" is like trying to telnet to port 7 of a machine. Most of the time this will just get you "connection refused" because nothing listens to that port on so many machines. But since UDP is not connection oriented, you can't get "connection refused" so the ping just fails.

So you want to do Net::Ping->new("icmp"), which works for me. You need to get at 0+$! in order to understand what "unknown error" really is so we can figure out what is going wrong. Either modify Ping.pm so that it reports this or use the Perl debugger to step into Ping.pm and query what that value is. Perhaps you have to be "administrator" in order to use ICMP under WinNT?

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")