(ducking arrows and hot tar...)
Why do you want to use Perl? This sounds like a UNIX sys admin 101 question. Shell would probably be best suited to handle a bunch of system calls. As for authentication, NIS or LDAP would be best suited for a grandiose remote authentication schema, rather than a)having the same password for every box, or b)having 200 hosts.equiv or .rhosts files to run rsh passwordless. Here's another option: get NetSaint. It's an awesome monitoring package written in C for linux platforms, but you can get the source and try it anywhere. A quick demonstration would probably convince a sys admin that it's worth installing.

Here's the really Perlish solution: Read Perl for System Administration