I use this all the time on my other Unix boxes.
It would be nice to have on Trinux also
http://www.fping.com
Basically it allows you to ping a list of IPs all at
once. I manage a "class-B" sized network subnetted
into many many smaller networks, so individually
PING-ing a thousand or more non-contiguous addresses is
only really do-able with fping.
Thomas Alexander
(Dzubin)