Perl firewall test script - detect whether host not responding orfirewall rule not implemented

[inetquestion]

I submitted some firewall rules today which will be implemented before
all the destination hosts are live on the network. In the past I put
a perl script on each source server and controlled them from a central
location to initiate a connection to each of the destinations to check
the connectivity. In this case that will not work.

Is there any scriptable way to know why a connection failed from the
source? For example when a failure occurs...to know whether the
connection was blocked by the firewall or it made it through but the
remote host was not listening.

-Inet