I found a brief post about Net::SSH::Perl on CPAN.

The problem I had was I could only login with a password, this wasn’t very secure, in favor of ssh-keygen key rings.

After digging, the above post mentioned passing “protocol => ‘2,1′, instead of default which is 1,2. This refers to ssh1 and ssh2.

The standard these days is ssh2, so reversing the default made my database backup application work as intended with public/private keys instead of password prompts.