G'day th'timmay,

Welcome to the monastery.

Looking at the Net::OpenSSH Source, I see the timeout defaults to 90. You're setting it to 10. Perhaps increasing that value might help.

Note the calculation in the _connect() method (which is called by new()):

sub _connect {
    my ($self, $async) = @_;
    $self->_set_error;

    my $timeout = int((($self->{_timeout} || 90) + 2)/3);
...
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The default evalutes to 30; your value of 10 evalutes to 4 (or maybe even 3 if (10 + 2)/3) == 3.9999999).