So, this does appear to work now, however, I've run into another related problem. Although the call does time out, when it does it segfaults and corrupts my bash shell. Using the following code:

eval {
    logit ("Attempting to send os password to ssh object for $cust | $
+alias") if ($debug==1);

    if ( timeout_call( $alarm_timer, sub { $ssh2->auth_password($os_us
+er,$os_pass); } )) {

        logit ("log in failed\n");
        $popout = 8;
        return 8;
    }
};
return $popout if ($popout > 0);
[download]

The second return is to "pop" me out of my subroutine. Here is what happens:

Tue Jan 16 15:01:16 2007: Attempting to send os password to ssh object

<
 2rootssh-connectiopasswordsisz
Segmentation fault
[support@hydra script]$
[download]

Although it doesn't look like it does above... it's full of odd ASCII characters. Any ideas? I'm using 0.12 of libssh2, my best guess is that this is a libssh2 bug, which I don't think is fixed in the latest release (0.14) - although getting that to compile on RHEL4 is another thread on another board. :-(