IO::Socket on Solaris9

[Micha³ Kurowski]

[Copy and paste from compl.lang.perl.moderated. Apologies for cross-posting]

I've got a serious trouble with my Solaris 9 (sparc) install. It is
related to ldap config but I will leave out details ;-)

What could be a reason for errors like:

lwp-download: 500 Can't connect to xxx (Bad hostname 'xxx').

generated by LWP software but really coming from IO::Socket::INET ?

I'm sure some strange Solaris wisdom is involved. System resolves
hostnames properly most of the time but some software has got problems
with "getprotobyname" functions. For example:

perl -MIO::Socket::INET -e '$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr =>
"localhost:smtp(25)"); print 1 . "\n" if($sock->connected);'

works OK but lwp-download returns just these "Bad hostname" errors ...

Your thoughts highly appreciated.