Net::Telnet

Hi all,

I'm pretty much looking for two things in this particular example.  I'm running a small script which will test if a socket is (22/tcp in this case) is non-responsive or if there is a complete connection refused.  Here's my code so far;

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::Telnet;

my $dump_log='telnet.log';
my $host = 'host';
my $mailer = '/usr/local/sbin/sendmail -t email\@email.com';

my $socket = new Net::Telnet (  Timeout     => 30,
                                Dump_log    => $dump_log,
                                Host        => $host,
                                Input_log   => $dump_log,
                                Output_log  => $dump_log,
                                Port        => 29,
                             );
 
$socket->waitfor('/^SSH.*$/') or mail();

sub mail {
    open(MAIL, "|$mailer");
    print MAIL << "EOF";
From: DataCtr <email\@email.com>
To: DataCtr <email\@email.com>
Subject: host 22/tcp non-responsive.

SSH is not responsive on host.
EOF
    close(MAIL);
}

========================

So if a connection is completely refused, I haven't found a method yet which captures this information so that I may report it.  I get a STDERR which reports that there is a connection refused.  (Note, I used port 29 here to replicate a 100% connection refusal for testing purposes .. in production I'd use port 22 to test ssh).

Also second question .. if the port is hung, it will also report that after the waitfor().  Now I could run the script in crontab every 5 minutes, but I don't wish to receive an email every 5 minutes notifying me that it is hung.  What kind of efficient sanity checking should I run?

I can either a) create a file and unlink it everytime there is a successful socket opened and create one when I can't and see if it exists before mailing.  b)  maybe run the program in an infinite loop using like a sleep(300); value and have it die if the connection is refused and manually restart the program after?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks!