[GENERAL] could not translate host name

I'm running postgres 9.6.2 (also happened on 9.3.14) and have a cron job that runs hourly that runs a program that does mostly postgres SELECTs on a different host. Occasionally I get email (not hourly) from the cron daemon that contains a stack trace that ends with this:

sqlalchemy.exc.OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) could not translate host name "db3.labmed.uw.edu" to address: Name or service not known

It has happened about 9 times so far this month. I have one of our network people look into this but there is no real answer. I could use the IP address but I'd rather not. This problem only happens on one host. I moved the data from db2 to db3. I was getting similar emails regarding db2 which runs the older postgres.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

Tom Ekberg
Senior Computer Specialist, Lab Medicine
University of Washington Medical Center
1959 NE Pacific St, MS 357110
Seattle WA 98195
work: (206) 598-8544
email: tekberg@uw.edu