java.net.UnknownHostException

Hi - I have a servlet that tries to make a HttpURLConnection to a website outside of my domain. Basically we send some info to another website so that the website can put a Cookie on the user's machine and then redirect back to our website(we use this to brand our site when user's come through a portal). anyway, this works in our QA and stage environment but not in production. Our environment consists of Weblogic 5.1 and Netscape on Unix (Sun Solaris) machines. We added the url to the host file in the production environment, but everytime we try to connect(which we do first to make sure the other website is "up"), our code throws a UnknownHostException - any clues?

What did you do to get the HttpURLConnection object for the site you want to access ? Using java.net.URL.openConnection() method ? How about trying to use IP address instead of hostnames ?