Actually Shivageeta did say "I am also able to manually telnet to the SUSE/SLES boxes". I would think if telnetd was not running on the machine, it would result in a simple failure to connect (so Net::Telnet->new returns undef and this is caught as a fatal error).
s^^unp(;75N=&9I<V@`ack(u,^;s|\(.+\`|"$`$'\"$&\"\)"|ee;/m.+h/&&print$&
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