The pinger is now fixed - it was a logfile permissions problem

The pinger was disabled since we moved over to the new server on www2 - and this is because of the nonstandard place the pingers were storing their logs. They were originally storing logs in /home/technorati/pingerlog, but the /home/technorati directory did not have execute permissions for the www-data group, so nothing could be written to the file.

Rather than fix that, I just changed the logging structure - created a new directory called /var/log/pinger, changed its ownership to www-data.www-data and then changed the pingers to use this new directory.

All is now well again.