Are you sure the strings are exactly the same?

Try comparing them character by character:

die "Different length" if length $HOSTNME != length $SRVCHX;
for my $pos (0 .. length($HOSTNME) - 1) {
    warn  warn "$HOSTNME\n", " " x $pos, "| $pos\n$SRVCHX\n"
        if substr($HOSTNME, $pos, 1) ne substr($SRVCHX, $pos, 1);
}
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Also, do you use strict? Just to make sure there's no typo in the variables' names.