Knowing the port you have configured Apache to listen on, you can use Telnet to talk directly to it.

Assuming that your mod_perl-enabled server listens to port 8080,[22] telnet to your server at port 8080, type HEAD /HTTP/1.0, and then press the Enter key twice:

[22]If in doubt, try port 80, which is the standard HTTP port.

panic% telnet localhost 8080
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

You should see a response like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 06 May 2002 09:49:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.24 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Connection closed.

The line:

Server: Apache/1.3.24 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26

confirms that you have mod_perl installed and that its version is 1.26.