Mja, that's possible. Not the way I'd set up things. But I'm confused, your question isn't "In Java I can check the return value of connect, and send another connect string if it fails, but I cannot do that in Perl", is it? In your original question, you said your Perl application was connecting to the same server, and I said that if set up properly, it should indeed connect to the same address - with the cluster taking care of moving addresses around.