When I use Spong( a monitoring package for services), I get the following messages in my syslog everytime Spong checks to see if the service is open: Did not receive identification string from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. The question I have is, what is a good way to keep this from happening? Switch the loglevel to warn rather than info? Here is the perl script I used to duplicate this error. It is taken from the spong source: <PerlCode> #!/bin/perl use warnings; use Sys::Hostname; use Socket; use IO::Socket; $line=""; $ip="127.0.0.1"; $port=998; $proto="tcp"; $iaddr = inet_aton( $ip ) || return -1; $paddr = sockaddr_in( $port, $iaddr ); $timeout=10; local $SIG{'ALRM'} = sub { die "Socket timed out"; }; alarm($timeout); socket( SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto ) || die "socket: $!"; connect( SOCK, $paddr ) || die "connect: $!"; select((select(SOCK), $| = 1)[0]); print SOCK "$data"; recv( SOCK, $line, 256, 0 ); # just grab a chunk from the service. alarm(0); close( SOCK ) || die "close: $!"; </PerlCode -- Austin Gonyou Systems Architect, CCNA Coremetrics, Inc. Phone: 512-796-9023 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]