I've been thinking about writing something similar to replace a hack I wrote. Right now I have a client that opens a socket, waits for input, then executes it in an eval and feeds the results back down the socket. The first line is a username/password for security. It doesn't spawn, so if it's already running a job it cannot accept another. Like I said, it's an ugly hack, but it did the job at the time.

I've been wanting to rewrite this as something more robust, but have been waiting for somebody else to start a base that I could extend to fit my need. The closest thing I've seen so far has been Win32::Procfarm (which I thought had a unix counterpart, but I can't seem to find it on cpan this morning...)

There's my contribution :-) I'll be watching this thread with bated breath.

Oh, there is also the Net::Distributed module that was posted here, if you'd like to take the anarchist's cluster approach ;^} Update: Link http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=142837