This way, your password is transferred in plain text over the net!

You could use a CGI script to give you the last line of the file; there is no need to use telnet.

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $correct = "eod complete exit status = 0";

    use LWP::UserAgent;
    my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
    my $req = new HTTP::Request
        GET => "http://server.net/obscure-url/loglastline.cgi";
    $res = $ua->request($req);
    if ($res->is_success) {
        warn "Log not correct: " . $res->content . "\n"
            unless ($res->content =~ /$correct/;
    } else {
        die "Ooops. something went wrong:\n" . 
            $res->as_string() . "\n";
    }
[download]

Update: Sorry -- maybe I shouldn't just assume that the Unix server has a webserver installed. I do recommend using ssh, though. You could even set up a user that upon login is presented with the last line of the shell script (set the login shell to a shell script that does that), then logs out. Set up a key pair for this user on the NT box and the Unix box, then call ssh using perl and catch the output. This should be much more secure.