Ryan Shillington wrote some tools to control the COREL Netwinder via infrared, for example:
Server Side for the Corel Palm Administrator (deamon). It depends on having ir-simple installed and up and running. With this you can check and change IP addresses, Gateway addresses, setup eth1, etc. You can also run simple commands AND you can check the Temperature, Memory, Load averages, etc.
Client Side for the Corel Palm Administrator. You can also run simple commands AND you can check the Temperature, Memory, Load averages, etc.
A very basic infrared device driver. This does not support IrDA (only unreliable transfers). It looks specifically for Remote Control signals (and Keyboard, etc.). It blocks and passes data up very differently.
You may find the tools at http://www.netwinder.org/~ryansh/