If you are most interested in getting it up and running quickly, without having to think much about the underlying details, telnet is probably the easiest route.

I say that largely because of the Net::Telnet module. It understands the idea of a CLI, setting the expected prompt character (appears to be "> " in BruteFir), etc.

Other than looking at BruteFir's docs for a few minutes, I don't have any experience with it. That said, this short example "should work", unless I missed something important.

my $host="hostname.whatever.com";
use Net::Telnet ();
$t = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 10,
                      Port => 3000,
                      Prompt => '/> $/');
$t->open($host);
@helptext = $t->cmd("help");
print @helptext;
[download]

One caveat...I did find it a bit odd that the CLI configuration allowed you to configure a listen port, but not which ip addresses to listen on, so you can't restrict it to just localhost. I didn't see support for a password either. So it appears that once you turn it on, anyone can connect to it. You might want to use iptables to restrict access if you go this route.