I think this code might be useful as a very low-tech load balancer, or in an n-tier environment.

The code starts by randomly selecting an IP from an array, then tries to make a socket connection to it. If that fails, it will try again until every IP in the array has been used. If the socket successfully connects, it stops trying.
use IO::Socket;
my @ips = ('XXX.XXX.XXX.X0','XXX.XXX.XXX.X1','XXX.XXX.XXX.X2');
my $port = XXXX;

# grab an IP randomly
my $index = int(rand(scalar @ips));

my $sock;
for (my $counter = 0; $counter < scalar @ips; $counter++) {
  # try to connect
  $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(  PeerAddr => $ips[$index].':'.$port,
                                  Blocking => 1,
                                  Timeout  => 1,
                               );
  # success!
  last if ($sock);

  # failure - get previous IP (loops around if negative, pretty sweet)
  $index--;
}

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In reply to Socket connection to random IP, with fallback by kwaping

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