Your right, I did mis-read. I took

2) I don't skip to the 'next' server

To mean that you were hanging at that point. Sorry, my mistake.

Thinking about this further, I have, what is no more than a speculation, that the new() call doesn't actually establish communications with the remote server, but simply readies the object for that communication. If this is true, then the way to determine if the server is actually there would be to check the return code from one of the calls that would force it to actually attempt the communication. Eg.

 $handle->GetOldest($base)
        or die "Can't get number of oldest EventLog record\n";
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Like I say, this is speculation, but worth a try.