SocketError (getaddrinfo: Name or service not known) - Sunspot/Solr Rails development

Question

I have had lots of trouble with deploying my rails 3.0.10 application to Ubuntu 10.04 server with Passenger, Capistrano, nginx and MySQL (and even more trouble with apache2)

Answer 1

It could be that one of your third party service URLs is incorrect. For example, we had the wrong SMTP mail address. An exception within the app caused it to email the error to the admins and it failed with the error. Here's how you know when it's a bad address:

irb(main):009:0> Socket.gethostbyname("example.net")
SocketError: getaddrinfo: Name or service not known