That's unforunate. I haven't used Net::NNTP, but with News::NNTPClient, I've used the help() call to check to see if I'm still connected. help also seems to be something that not all servers implement, but if your server has it, and you can run it from Net::NNTP, that might be an option. It probably has a lot more overhead than a simple date call though, especially if the server is actually trying to give you some useful information.