I feel bad giving you a non-perl answer, but why not just use an SNMP agent (like the free UCDavis SNMP agent)? It is already designed to do what you want (take in network requests and return status info; it has an extension to run programs and return the results). SNMP is a well-documented, RFC'd protocol designed to do this kind of stuff. There are already perl modules that implement SNMP (so you can easily do your client bit in perl). Using what is already built will probably save you a lot of time and effort.