Hmm. Well, though your suggestion, as well as SysApe9000's suggestion, is excellent and much more robust, my problem is that outside of my home LAN, the only server presence, the only control I have is my paid-for webhost which, sadly, does not allow SSH logins and, since I am on a shared server, does not allow me to set up and configure a proxy.

Sad, really.

Thank you folks for your input and feedback. This script has helped me much; I'm already getting fun ideas for network programming in Perl. I look forward to playing with your suggestions sometime in my future, just not right now. ::sighs::

-Shawn / (P^h) Phaysis
If idle hands are the tools of the devil, are idol tools the hands of god?