Socket w/SSL Issues

PHP is installed without openssl here at pair. I want to make a socket call to port 443 on a server and I'm getting an error from fsocketopen() that no ssl support is built in, of course. I thought that using "ssl://" might work around this, but I guess not. Any ideas for me? $host = "my.host.com"; $port = 443; $path = "/my/app/path"; $request = urlencode('my xml request'); $fp = fsockopen("ssl://".$host, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout = 30); if(!$fp){ //error tell us echo "$errstr ($errno)\n"; }else{ //send the server request fputs($fp, "POST $path HTTP/1.1\r\n"); fputs($fp, "Host: $host\r\n"); fputs($fp, "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n"); fputs($fp, "Content-length: ".strlen($request)."\r\n"); fputs($fp, "Connection: close\r\n\r\n"); fputs($fp, $request . "\r\n\r\n"); //loop through the response from the server while(!feof($fp)) { echo fgets($fp, 4096); } //close fp - we are done with it fclose($fp); } Thanks in advance. Steve