rhn-satellite-activate or rhn-channel operations fail with "socket.gaierror:"

Issue

• Running the command rhn-satellite-activate after updating rhn.conf with the proxy infocauses the following error message:

# rhn-satellite-activate --rhn-cert=/path/to/cert  
RHN_PARENT: satellite.rhn.redhat.com  

ERROR: unhandled exception occurred:  
[...]  
socket.SOCK_STREAM):  
socket.gaierror: (-2, 'Name or service not known')

• running rhn-channel --available-channels or rhn-channel -L results in this traceback:

Username: *exampleuser*  
Password:  

Traceback (most recent call last):  
    File "/usr/sbin/rhn-channel", line 145, in <module>  
        main()  
    File "/usr/sbin/rhn-channel", line 137, in main  
        channels = get\_available\_channels(OPTIONS.user, OPTIONS.password)  
[...]  
    File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/httplib.py", line 1112, in connect  
        sock = socket.create_connection((self.host, self.port), self.timeout)  
    File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/socket.py", line 553, in create_connection  
        for res in getaddrinfo(host, port, 0, SOCK_STREAM):  
socket.gaierror: [Errno -3] Temporary failure in name resolution