I did try that already... several times even. Can't get it to work. I read up on this a bit as well. It seems a lot of people have trouble getting any timeout method to work on sockets in windows. I have read that the alarm function is limited in windows.... maybe it just can't work with sockets? For now I am using Net::Ping to make sure the host exists first, but that is really ineffecient. Maybe I should use a module of some sort?