Checking Network Access

[MrsKensington]

As BT keep on cutting off our ADSL unexpectedly i've decided to write a perl script to show the state of e-mail, internet and internal network access, so people in other departments can check if there are any errors before phoning technical support.
I have an idea on checking the Internal Network and internet access. They both involve copying a file and timing how long it takes and from there deciding if it is running fine, slow or not at all.
For the local network i'm copying a 1Mb file off one of our servers and for the internet access i'm copying a 100K file off demons FTP site (it's a test file so it'll always be there).

I have this at the top of my page
use File::Copy;
$localFile = "\\\\amy\\Shr_Docs2\\doNotDelete";

my current code is

#get start time
$startTime = getCurrentTime();
#do job
getSpeedOfLocalNetwork($localFile);
#get end time
$endTime = getCurrentTime();
#get time difference
print getTimeTaken($startTime, $endTime);

where getSpeedOfLocalNetwork() is...

sub getSpeedOfLocalNetwork()
{
	my ($file) = @_;
	my $toReturn = -1;  
	if (copy($file, "c:\emptyFile"))
	{
		$toReturn = 1;
	}
	else
	{
		$toReturn = 0;
	}	
	return $toReturn;
}

for some reason it always returns 0! What am I doing wrong?

Is there a better way of testing/timing it?

Thanks alot for your help

p.s. oh and I definately got the path correct Ford? There's an infinite number of monkeys outside wanting to talk to you about a script of Hamlet they've produced!!