I think you are making a mistake here but it is probably a typo?

unpack("a4", inet_ntoa($buffer);
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Also have you tried doing this on the same machine?

my $buf,$str;
my $ip_addr="10.10.10.1";
$buf=pack("a4",inet_aton($ip_addr));
$str=inet_ntoa(unpack("a4",$buf));
print "$str\n";
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Do you get the correct address after doing this? If you do perhaps you are misconfiguring your setup to transmit the bytes over the socket?

metadoktor

"The doktor is in."