well, my problem is that i dont really want to make another progran to communicate with it, i was just hoping to use telnet, so i would not have to put the client program on each machine i was to use it on. Thanks for all of your tips.
There is a Net::Telnet module, you may want to check it out on CPAN. Also, the default port for Telnet is 23, I am not sure how familiar you are with telnet, you may want to have some fun reading with Telnet Spec, IETF RFC 854