What you have described is not a Perl problem but you want "a birds eye perspective" so here are two approaches.

1. Configure the remote machine to act as a proxy for the internal machine. Execute the script on the internal server as described.
2. Execute the script on a remote machine with web access. Transfer the files to the internal server via SFTP, SCP or another secure protocol*.

* Forget about FTP or telnet.

As has already been pointed out, this isn't really a Perl specific question.

It could be that the direction was to use ftp to collect the script from the current machine and move to the new machine. The bad news is that ftp is hilariously insecure -- the username/password is sent in plaintext. Also, the ftp protocol is just used to transfer files (ftp stands File Transfer Protocol, in case you weren't aware); normally, there's no way for you to execute a script using ftp.

Once the script is moved to the new machine, you could set cron up to run the script at particular times, perhaps saving the result in a directory, possibly with a timestamp so that you could get datasets at difference times. Alternatively, cron could run on your local machine to run the script on the internal server.

G'day igrepstuff,

Welcome to the Monastery.

I have done something fairly similar to this; although, it was a long, long time ago (>15 years). The basic steps, as best as I remember, were:

1. Use cron to start Perl script on local Unix machine.
2. Perl script connects, via ftp, to remote MVS machine.
3. The ftp quote command started COBOL program on MVS machine.
4. The ftp get command retrieved output from MVS machine.
5. Retrieved output processed on the local Unix machine.
6. Rinse and repeat on next cron cycle.

It was somewhat more involved than that; for instance, there was the ability to monitor progress on the remote machine from the local machine. However, the important bit is that everything, except basic FTP commands (like get), were performed using the quote command.

I don't know how the commands via quote were set up for the remote machine; it's not something I've ever had to do; I can't help you further with that aspect of your task.

I suggest you speak to the administrators of your remote machine and discuss your task with them.

[As already pointed out by others, this in not really a Perl question. We do allow some latitude with off-topic questions; however, please add an [OT] prefix to your question's title. See "How do I change/delete my post?" if you're not sure how to do this. Thankyou.]

Thank you all for responding to my question!

I appreciate that it's not exactly a perl question and also that you did respond and not just dismiss it. Each of your responses has helped. I was able to resolve the issue by keeping my perl script on the web machine, executing it with a cron (encrypt the output) and send the results back via ftp.