Further to the above suggestions. Try changing the connection string to localhost (127.0.0.1) and ftp to the host machine. Further use of traceroute and ping, as well as performing the ftp conection manually, may help you garner more information.

But the best suggestion really is to have as much debugging as possible.

This problem may be more of an unix administration problem than a Perl problem. If it is Perl, then some relevant code could help.

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Graq