Hi,

Another approach to solve your problem is using the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). If you are allowed to run snmp-daemons on the servers you want to check, its quite easy and you'll get uniform results regardless of the OS (in theory at least). Using tools like 'snmpwalk' you could get the information you want from a remote host like this:

prompt$ snmpwalk -c mylittlesecret -v 1 remotehost | egrep 'ifDescr|if
+AdminStatus'
IF-MIB::ifDescr.1 = STRING: sis0
IF-MIB::ifDescr.2 = STRING: vr0
IF-MIB::ifDescr.3 = STRING: lo0
IF-MIB::ifDescr.4 = STRING: faith0
IF-MIB::ifAdminStatus.1 = INTEGER: up(1)
IF-MIB::ifAdminStatus.2 = INTEGER: up(1)
IF-MIB::ifAdminStatus.3 = INTEGER: up(1)
IF-MIB::ifAdminStatus.4 = INTEGER: down(2)
[download]

Just be sure you do this on a well protected intranet (I guess so because you use telnet to connect to the remote host), or use SNMP version 3 which has much better security than the standard version 1 (which I used in the example above, by using '-v 1')

Of course you could use Net::SNMP instead of 'snmpwalk' to query remote snmp-daemons.