If say, you had 50 ips in the array, and a block of 40 of them where duds, then you wouldn't get a very load balanced selection from the remaining 10. The burden would largely keep falling on a single ip and you'd probably be just as well off looping through the array sans random?

Instead of looping around the array, I would remove each try from the remaining pool: 
use IO::Socket;
my @ips = ('XXX.XXX.XXX.X0','XXX.XXX.XXX.X1','XXX.XXX.XXX.X2');
my $port = XXXX;

my $sock;
while (@ips) {
  # radmomly pick an ip from the list (removing it at the same time)
  my $ip = splice(@ips, rand(@ips), 1);

  # try to connect
  $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(  PeerAddr => $ip.':'.$port,
                                  Blocking => 1,
                                  Timeout  => 1,
                               );
  # success!
  last if ($sock);
}

[download]
I did like your negative index trick!

In reply to Re: Socket connection to random IP, with fallback by ruzam
in thread Socket connection to random IP, with fallback by kwaping

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.