Let me get this straight. We have a client attach to Server A (via http). During the handling of this request, it is determined that a connection to Server B is required to run some other program. Is that right?

So the question is - what protocol to use? That will entirely drive the module(s) that you can use/need. Do you connect via telnet, or ssh, or rsh, or something else? Perhaps Server B is also running a webserver, in which case your CGI script can just use LWP to connect and pass stuff in and get the returns back. But you have to determine how you want to make these connections.

Thanks, Tank. I'll reply to the other reply as a general reply to both of you.

How i have handled this in the past (UNIX, by the way) is to set up a server on the remote box that will run the remote commands. The client passes a string to the server via Sockets, the server parses that string (ensures it is a safe command to run) and forks a child process to run the command. It then waits on the child process and collects exit info when the child is reaped and passes the data back to the client over the socket.

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Hi Tank and jeffa,

Tank, you have exposed some of my ignorance of protocols and their capabilities. I know I can use scp to easily bring the information over. That's about it.

jeffa, I think you are hitting on what I need to do and in fact your explanation does more than I need. Basically, I could sure use that Socket part to pass information, as well as the ability for the remote server to fetch that value and spawn a simple script. It doesn't need to give any information back to the source server.

Well, I guess I'll study the Socket mod and see how to pass the info and spawn a program.

Thanks!

Tony

Like Tanktalus mentioned, sound like a job for LWP.

Simply post the required form data to the ServerB via LWP. The script on ServerB will need to send some sort of response which you can process in the script on ServerA

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $response = $ua->post(
  $url,
  {
   'field1'=>$data1,
   'field2'=>$data2,
   etc
  );

if ($response->is_success) {
  my $accepted = $response->content;
  #process data
} else {
  #error
}
[download]

Thanks

I'll bone up on this LWP method.

Tony