Adding one questionable approach to another is IMHO, not wise.

There is certainly truth in it... It is just that since the OP emphasized that he has the password stored in plain text, it seemed to me that password security was not considered a big issue, and in this case Net::Telnet is available in Core, while the SSH stuff needs to be installed first. Maybe I'm spoiled by too many projects where root passwords were freely sent around unencrypted. But the suggestion to use SSH is certainly the better one, and in the end the OP has to decide for him/herself what to use...