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If you ever get such a wonderful verbose error message like this while running a Ruby script that uses sockets:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/drb/drb.rb:837:in `getaddrinfo': 

getaddrinfo: Name or service not known (SocketError)

Look for problems in /etc/hosts. In my case I wanted to use the Ferret drb-server and /etc/hosts was completely empty on a fresh EC2 node.

Just add a

127.0.0.1       localhost

And the problem goes away.