Temporary failure in name resolution for local socket

I am operating a Debian Jessie server in a local network, which is separated from Internet. Therefore, it does not have a DNS server available.

On this server I try to launch a self-developed web application using Python Pyramid and the waitress server. This launching failes if the server is not connected to internet with the following error:

File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/waitress-1.0.0-py3.4.egg/waitress/server.py", line 292, in getsockname
    self.socketmod.NI_NUMERICSERV)
socket.gaierror: [Errno -3] Temporary failure in name resolution

Everything works fine if the server is connected to Internet and has a DNS server configured.

How can I resolve this, to successfully start waitress without a reachable DNS server?

This problem is specific to waitress 1.0.x and should be fixed in future versions.

Also see https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/issues/149.