varnishadm purge.list broken?

[Gaute Amundsen]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 
2.6.9-67.ELsmp
varnish-2.0.3


# varnishadm -T localhost:90 purge.list
An error occured in receiving answer.


Doing a few purges both by hash and url to fill the list makes no difference.

Is this supposed to work?
Anything I should try?
We are upgrading servers soon, will a newer distribution make a difference?
( to ubuntu server jeos 8.04 )

Regards 
Gaute Amundsen