Telnet Script

[guest]

I have a telnet script that fires off and retreives the number of users logged into my redback router. The problem is, telnet crashed on the router last night but was still passing traffic. My cmd.php file got to this part of the file fired off the telnet script and because the host was down it just sat their until it timed out. By this time 5 minutes passed and the graphs got a few spikes. Anyone know how to force the timeout to be like 2 seconds on the intitial telnet connection?