Hey guys,

I currently have a cgi application that has to talk to a remote mysql server.
I would very much like to encrypt these transactions since some of the information is fairly important. I haven't been able to see any perl modules ( such as Net::SSH and Net::SSH::Perl ) which provide methods for building and tearing down ssh tunnels.
I can fork a process to build the tunnel myself but this is messy and despite my best efforts to tear it down often leaves the tunnel standing. This forked process ( for tunnel building ) also means that I am currently sleeping the cgi process for a set interval to allow time for the tunnel to build and I am also concerned that if there is high traffic everything could fail ( though I try to handle that gracefully ).

simplistically the code looks like this

my $childPid = fork();

if ($childPid)
{
     sleep 2;
## then open the database
## do stuff
     kill 'HUP', $childPid;
}
else
{ 
     exec("ssh $user\@$host -L 3306:$host:3306 -N");
}
[download]

With this background my question is do you guys know of a module that I haven't found that deals with ssh tunneling so that the tunnel becomes an object to be used or something??

or alternatively can you suggest a way to get the code to recognise when the tunnel is up and inform the other process so that I am not dependant on a fixed sleep interval??

Thanks in Advance