fopen problems

Hello all, I have an install of php on a Red Hat Ent. server that is giving me fits. I have been trying to use the fopen command to retreive files from external sites and have been getting this error: Warning: fopen(http://us3.php.net/images/php.gif): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!
in /home/test/public_html/declare.php on line 2 My code is as follows: <? if($handle=fopen("http://us3.php.net/images/php.gif","r")) { echo "\n\nOPENED REMOTE FILE\n\n"; while (!feof($handle)) { $buffer = fgets($handle,4096); echo $buffer; } fclose($handle); } else echo "\n\nFAILED TO OPEN REMOTE FILE\n\n"; ?> My Fopen section of my php.ini file. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Fopen wrappers ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Whether to allow the treatment of URLs (like http:// or ftp://) as files. allow_url_fopen = On ; Define the anonymous ftp password (your email address) ;from="john@doe.com" ; Define the User-Agent string ; user_agent="PHP" ; Default timeout for socket based streams (seconds) default_socket_timeout = 60 ; If your scripts have to deal with files from Macintosh systems, ; or you are running on a Mac and need to deal with files from ; unix or win32 systems, setting this flag will cause PHP to ; automatically detect the EOL character in those files so that ; fgets() and file() will work regardless of the source of the file. ; auto_detect_line_endings = Off As I stated before This is on a Red Hat Ent Server that is connected to the internet behind a SonicWall (300 I believe) firewall appliance. I am able to use the fget command to retrieve files from sites that are also behind said firewall. Any help anyone could give me would be greatly appreciated. AJ Lemke