The obvious question is, can you connect using a regular telnet client? If so, where does your connection with Net::Telnet go wrong? Does the connection succeed at the TCP/IP level? Does the other side issue a login/password prompt? Is your password correct? Is your regex for the prompt correct - it looks very suspicious to me, it matches lines where the second character is a >, and it's preceded by a character that isn't a space, a <, or a -? Do you get a timeout? Do you get an error message? Do you have Net::Telnet installed?

Abigail