Simple TCP server recomendations

[Random_Walk]

Greetings honoured monks

I have a client daemon that will be distributed to a (reasonably large) number of machines on our internal network. I need a way to remotely interogate the client for its logfiles, current version etc (this requirement is likely to expand to other methods too). I also need to be able to send it updated config files and updates to the code base. It has to be multi-platform (aix, linux, win32).

I am thinking of a simple server listening on the client and passing requests recieved to subs. Where it need to download stuff I will have it connect to a hardcoded server name to look for and grab a new version (we have control of the DNS).

• Does my approach sound sane
• a maze of twisty server modules ....
  • SOAP::Lite
  • Net::Server
  • Net::EasyTCP
  • Net::Server::NonBlocking
  • NetServer::Generic

I have the feeling I could spend the rest of this week reading CPAN module POD and still not really be enlightenend. Any of the above recomended or did I miss your favourite ? Is it really worth the learning curve of POE ? I don't want to start developing to some module that turns out to be broken, abandoned or buggy on one platform.

Many thanks for your time and experience,
R.