I'm not sure what you want to do, just to connect to the server to see if it's alive? No traffic, transactions etc? If the socket is not there(i.e. the server isn't running) a tcp socket will fail immedidately with the infamous and hurtful "connection refused"(ECONNREFUSED)

You might want to spend some time reading the man page on IO::Socket::INET

Perl provides a WONDERFUL built in variable $! that is kind of a combination of errno and strerror. You can check the result of your connection with this variable in addition to getting an undef back to clarify WHY it didn't connect:

use Errno ; # for ECONNREFUSED
use IO::Socket::INET ;

# portions copies from the IO::Socket::INET man page:
            $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => 'www.perl.org',
                                          PeerPort => 'http(80)',
                                          Proto    => 'tcp');

if( $sock == undef && $! == ECONNREFUSED ) {
    # server not operating?
}
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