The documentation has a section for Diagnostics and Using a Devel::REPL shell. I guess you could also use something like Wireshark to montior what's going on, and compare differences between the modules vs manual connections.

See also perldebug and Debugging and Optimization from the tutorials section.

I was just looking into something similar yesterday, in trying to figure out how to allow Net::SSH2's channel to start a background process on the target machine, without it dying when the ssh connection is dropped. See Re^7: A little demo for Net::SSH2.

What I noticed is that the c version of ssh2 has the ability to automatically put itself into the background and run commands as no_tty ( or something like that).

In other words, the c version detachs itself automatically, but a perl connection may need it done manually with

nohup perlprog.pl &
[download]

I'm just trying to point out the detachment process, as a possible reason for the difference between the c ssh and the Perl version, and that maybe it is the cause of your problem.

Hi marto and zentara,

Thanks both for your advice.

I have got some results from bit of what each of you have said.

I have used tcpdump and I can see that the perl script sends the command and the Cisco ASA replies to the command, but for some reason, the script behaves as if the device did not reply

I have not looked into SSH timeout prevention, as the timeout that I'm talking about isn't the type that the SSH timeout prevention addresses. What I mean by timeout is the script not appearing to receive the data from the sevice and the call to cmd() funtion hangs, until the timeout value of seconds is reached and it continues once this happens.

I'll have a look at the other suggestions you have both made soon, but I wanted to report back on things I have found so far.

Thanks,

Richard.

Hi,

Another update on this is that I has tried SSH2 in the past and I ran into the problem talked about in: http://cpanforum.com/threads/851