[erlang-questions] sending multiple packets on the same socket

[BOG BOG]

Hello everybody,

I have a little problem and I do not know how to resolve it.

I am writing a little client that must communicate with a server based on sessions:

Basically this is the scenario:

1. client sends the login request to the server;
2. server responds with an welcome message
3. after that, client send other messages to the server, in this newly created session
4. the session is closed normally by the client issuing a closing message to the server.

The client is written in erlang, and the server in perl.

The problem:

I'm not able to keep the socket open in order to send successive packets to 
the server, because the socket is automatically closed when the client receives the welcome message from the server.

I want to be able to make succesive calls to the pair
gen_tcp:send(Socket, Packet),
gen_tcp:recv(Socket, 0)

on the same socket (the socket is opened with the option {active, false}).

I've tried a statement like this upon socket creation:
{ok, Socket} = gen_tcp:connect("epp.rotld.ro", 5544, [binary, {packet, 0},
     {active, false}, {exit_on_close,false},        
     {keepalive,true},{reuseaddr,true}]),

and to subsequent calls to inet:setopts(), but the socket behaves in the same way - it is closing after the first reply of the server.

Thank you very much,

bogdan