Joachim Breitner mentioned this applet in his blog syndicated to
Planet-Debian
It looks interesting and as he says it gives you an indication you have
a network connection without the need to ping an external IP address.
Just do a 'mouseover' on the panel icon.
It needs to be ported to GTK3 if it is to survive into Gnome 3 but
doesn't currently have an active developer. 
-- 
John Lewis
using Debian sid 
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