Hi Mr. Muskrat, thank you for your response...it's been really helpful trying to debug what's going on. The thing is...I don't even want to use SSL to connect, as the connection will manage data that is neither relevant nor important (it's one of the tools percona provides to perform some checks over the data, but I tracked the issue to the connection itself rather than the tool, as I was able to reproduce the error creating that simple connection script). I tried specifying mysql_ssl=0 at the dsn, with no luck. I can connect to the server using mysql client without SSL, but couldn't get it to work with perl. Perl version is v5.22.1 built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi, and we first started having this kind of issues when we moved from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubunt 16.04 Any Ideas?