"I used the Perl debugger to step into Net::Ping and found that the connect() was failing with "Connection refused". What does this mean? It means that the other computer is up, is reachable, and isn't listening on TCP port 7 (and it did this all without triggering the time out). Well, that is a wonderful form of a successful ping in my book. When I ping a computer, I don't want to be told whether it is listening on port 7! So Net::Ping should return a true value for this case. Instead it returns a false value and manages to hide the value of $! so you can't just change the false to true if $! is "Connection refused". *sigh*"