I hope this isn't frowned upon in the Monastery, but while I have no crushingly awesome PERL way around this problem, I do possess a good memory. I read this post on slashdot a week or two ago. It's about tricking linux into acting like a slow wide area network for testing. Maybe this well help you out. Apologies in advance if cross linking is frowned upon: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/10/0136251