CRON NEEDED

Your programmer doesn't know about Google, apparently.
Linux does indeed have cron.

http://www.scrounge.org/linux/cron.html
http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/startupman/linux_sucron.html

Have your system admin check to see why it isn't running, if it isn't. There are several things that need to be set up for a user to be able to use cron.

Although your programmer is wrong about Linux not having a CRON command, there are ways around using CRON. You could just set up a script to run 24x7. It should sleep for your set interval then run the ping test again etc....
Also a second script that can monitor that the primary script is useful in case the primary one fails, the secondary script can notify admin that the primary script needs to be restarted. The second script should just be given either the process id or the script name of the first script as a parameter to grep for in a "ps -ef" command.

That is the easiest/quickest way to setup a job if CRON isn't available.

Linux does indded have "CRON" command, except that like all unix, it's called `at`.

You set up rights in cron.deny and cron.allow files (if not the super user) and use the `at` command to fire up the programme.

In your case, the program could be a shell simple script to
`ping` appended to a file.

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