SSH stands for Secure SHell, and is similar to telnet, except that it encrypts the data sent over the socket using one of a variety of encryption algorithms (which you can choose in the setup).

There are a few modules for Perl, notably Net::SSH which is a wrapper around the unix 'ssh' command, and needs ssh to also be installed. There is also Net::SSH::Perl which is a pure perl implementation, and needs several other encryption modules to work.

You'll also need to make sure that an ssh server is actually running on the machines that you connect to.

C.

(More info from http://www.ssh.com and http://www.openssh.org )