Hi. Thank you for replying so quickly.

As I've continued to look at this I think the basic problem is nothing more than the fact that this is an incredibly out of date machine. It was supposed to have been decommissioned last year but they keep using it.

Disabling the STDERR redirect gives me behavior more like what I saw before I looked at this thread. The child/delivery process fails to connect to the remote host but doesn't know it. The SSH error message shows up in the parent/dispatcher log. Parent sees only that the child is still running.

But the parent log, on top of showing that the name/service isn't known, probably tells me everything I need to know about why this problem persists:

OpenSSH_3.9p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7a Feb 19 2003
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: Applying options for *
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
ssh: ftp.unsioloX.com: Name or service not known
2017/03/17 09:21:22 main        DEBUG   child process '19075' still ru
+nning
2017/03/17 09:21:22 main                1 jobs currently running
2017/03/17 09:22:22 main        DEBUG   child process '19075' still ru
+nning
2017/03/17 09:22:22 main                1 jobs currently running
[download]

Probably just another reason for them to abandon this thing.

D