icmp ping, check port, etc.

Hello, I've been looking into setting up a site to check the hosts on my network. Basically, I want it to ping each host and tell whether it is up or not, then also check various services (www, ftp, smtp, pop3, dns, ssh) and see if they are available. This would check either for a connection refused or a timeout. I am wondering first, how to do the icmp ping. Then, will fsockopen work for both seeing if the port is open, and checking for timeout? I'm sure I can play with fsockopen and figure it out, but I wanted to ask and make sure it was possible first. The ping portion is where I am stuck at. Any help would he greatly appreciated! Thanks, Bryan