resLISa
If you hav very strict security rules in your network or you don't want to have another port open or whatever, you can use resLISa.
With resLISa you can't ping whole networks and address ranges, you can give resLISa up to currently 64 hosts by their names in its config file. These will be pinged. You are still able to use nmblookup.
resLISa will also only provide the information over a unix domain socket, not over the network. The name of the socket is /tmp/resLisa-YourLoginname so resLISa can be savely run by more users on one machine.
Since it should also not produce a security risk of any kind it is safe to install resLISa setuid root. root privileges will be dropped right after startup (see strictmain.cpp), they are only needed to create a raw socket for sending the ICMP echo requests.
It will also not send or receive broadcasts. The first client for this is also an ioslave for 2 (rlan:/ in for example.)