Socket, java.net.UnknownHostException

[Andrew Lowcock]

I've got a big problem.
I've have an FTP class that opens a connection to a remote machine, that has been used many times and works well in production. However ....
I've recently used the FTP component in another application which I need to show to clients, and I get java.net.UnknownHostException when passing an IP address in as the parameter - this works fine on my Win2k dev machine, and the destination IP is that of another Win2k machine.
The code fails on a Linux machine (I can however use the account under which the application is run to manually establish a connection to the FTP server as I would expect)
Could anyone please suggest where I could start looking for the problem? I am really at a loss. Apologies if this is the wrong forum. Here is the stack trace.
Many thanks (I've posted this to advanced topics also - sorry for the duplication)
Exception Trace:
java.net.UnknownHostException: rdan
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:571)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:540)
at java.net.InetAddress.getByName(InetAddress.java:449)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:100)
at com.companyxxxxx.ftp.FTPControlSocket.<init>(FTPControlSocket.java:78)
at com.companyxxxxx.ftp.FTPControlSocket.<init>(FTPControlSocket.java:63)
at com.companyxxxxx.ftp.FTPClient.<init>(FTPClient.java:79)
at com.companyxxxxx.intranet.candidatexmlimportproofing.servlet.forms.EditCandidateServlet.ftpFiles(EditCandidateServlet.java:547)
at com.companyxxxxx.intranet.candidatexmlimportproofing.servlet.forms.EditCandidateServlet.doPost(EditCandidateServlet.java:193)

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

OK, well, duplication aside, I'm glad you posted this, because the new information is very useful. Look at that stack trace: Java's clearly trying to lookup a host named "rdan"

Exception Trace:
java.net.UnknownHostException: rdan
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:571)
at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:540)
at java.net.InetAddress.getByName(InetAddress.java:449)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:100)

I looked at the JDK source; these classes haven't changed in a long time so even without knowing what Java version you're using I can see what's going on.
The important line is InetAddress.java line 449:

    public static InetAddress getByName(String host)
throws UnknownHostException {
Object obj = null;
if (host == null || host.length() == 0) {
    return loopbackHost;
}
        if (!Character.isDigit(host.charAt(0))) {
    return getAllByName0(host)[0];      // **** This is 449
} else {

Anyway, you can see that this is being passed a host name, not an IP address, as you assert -- it doesn't start with a number. If you look at the Socket constructor at line 100, you'll see it's just

    public Socket(String host, int port)
throws UnknownHostException, IOException
    {
this(InetAddress.getByName(host), port, null, 0, true); // *** Line 100
    }

So without any shadow of a doubt, your code is passing the host name to a Socket constructor, not the dotted-quartet IP address, and the Linux box can't look up the hostname. Check your code!
A quick fix, by the way, could be to add the host "rdan" to the /etc/hosts file.

[Andrew Lowcock]

OK I solved this - I simply needed to .trim() the ip address that I obtained from the database. This extra white space seemed to be ignored on Win2k, but not on Linux....
Cheers
Andrew