Here's the little bit of code that is the issue 
sub send_rcon {
    my ($server, $port, $password, $command, %message_info) = @_;
    my $incoming;
    use IO::Socket;
    my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $server,
                       PeerPort => $port,
                       Proto => 'udp') or return "rcon: socket error [
+$!].";

    if ($socket) {
    $socket->send(chr(255)x4 . "rcon $password $command") or return "r
+con: send error [$!].";
    $SIG{ALRM} = sub { scm($message_info{'irc_chan'}, "rcon: timed out
+.", $message_info{'kernel'}); };
    eval {
        alarm (5);
        sysread($socket, $incoming, 1024) or return "rcon: return erro
+r [$1].";
        alarm (0);
        close $socket;
    };
    }
    return $incoming;
}

[download]
I went to test the timeout by specifying the ip address of 10.0.0.1 and port of 275001, on my machine it does as intended and sends the timeout message to the channel but once ran from another machine the irc bot just freezes and the process has to be killed and restarted again, but I've had it working successfully once on the other machine and the other 9 times I've tried just resulted in it being frozen. Any explanations as to what could be causing this?

In reply to Alarm not working across systems by rendler

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.