Hey Crumpet,
I had a similair problem once, trying to run ssh in a CGI. I think my problem was that although it ran fine from the command line, (as user smitz), when run under CGI (user nobody) ssh didnt have a host/allow file, so it asks

'Accept this key? %^&5675%^& etc...'

I solved it (stupidly!) by getting the admin to log in as nobody and ssh to my server just once, then press 'y' when it asks to accept the key. Then it worked.
I say stupidly because, of course, I should have used Net::SSH::Perl. As should you!


SMiTZ