How do I verify the certificate of a specific computer when the DNS gives me one of many IP addresses?

I have a cloud setup with 6 front end computers using Apache. I installed a new SSL certificate. Now I want to verify that all the machines have the certificate.

The problem is if I just use https://www.example.com/ the IP address is going to be randomly assigned and I will be able to verify one of the computers. The DNS returns one of the 6 IP addresses in a simple form of round robins.

I know how to force the IP address on my computer using the /etc/hosts file, but I am hoping that there could be an easier way to do that. Like using curl and specifying the IP address along the domain name?

I prefer to have it as command line (wget, curl, open_ssl…) so that way I can write a script and verify the date of the certificate in an automated way and make sure all the computers present the correct certificate. The command should download the certificate so it can be checked on my client computer.

$ curl --resolve example.com:443:192.0.2.4 https://example.com

$ openssl s_client -connect 192.0.2.4:443 -servername example.com