freetds is hanging while trying to connect to the offline host

Hi,
I have got many SQL Server hosts in freetds.conf and usually database
connection check works fine.
But sometimes all SQL Server databases in freetds.conf are giving
timeout messages. It seems that it is because a server is down
resulting in freetds is hanging while trying to connect to the offline
host. Even though our script cycles through all the database servers,
it relies on freetds which cannot go past the offline host. The
resolution is to remove the host entries in freetds.conf . Setting
different timeouts within freetds hasn’t helped.
Any ideas how to fix this hanging problem?

Thank you and best regards, Eugene.