The fact that you can't find the prototype by name, or the service by name suggest that the databases in /etc/protocols and /etc/services have problems. Either they are unreadable (permissions? chrooted environment?), empty, corrupt, or are lacking elementary entries, none of which should happen on a standard Solaris install. The fact they fail is more likely to be an OS issue than a Perl issue (but it could be a Perl issue).

As for the question whether this breaks something, that's hard to say. That all depends on what the code is doing with the values. Since your program seems to be running ok without having the results of the get*byname functions, my question is, is the program using the values?

Abigail