Your line below will not work:

 my $dos = Win32::OLE->new('Cmd.application') or die "oops\n";
 $dos->{visible} = 1;
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Why? Because Cmd.application is not a registerred class and OLE does not know what to do with it.

As to why 'Cmd.application' is not a registerred OLE class, I guess it's because of security issues, imagine openning a file with embedded object that invokes your CMD.exe and delete files...

There are perl equivalents to what you wanted to do on the local machine -

dir:       opendir
cd:        chdir
ipconfig:  qx(PATH/ipconfig.exe)
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And you don't want to allow execution of DOS commands remotely, too much security concerns.

I guess one thing you could do is to install trusted remote clientsservers that listen on TCP ports, and execute commands based on remote requests. One such client we are using here is On Command Remote which allows you to remotely issue command and install programs, etc...

Worse comes to worst, you can always roll your own client/server systems.