Problem with fopen url wrapper

Got php4.03pl1 installed on RHL6.2 with Apache 1.3.12 and am having intermittent difficulties with fopen'ing urls. When issuing the fopen() call it will hang for a couple of minutes. Network access for other stuff on the same machine is fine, eg a perl script doing a similar thing with socket functions (socket/connect (?) ) works great. I've done an strace like so: strace php -q test.php Where test.php is this: $fp = fopen('http://yahoo.com/', 'r'); fclose($fp); It seems to hang at a poll() function: ... close(3) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 3 connect(3, {sin_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.1")}}, 16) = 0 send(3, "0P\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\5yahoo\3com\0\0\34\0\1", 27, 0) = 27 time(NULL) = 977234104 poll( Which then repeats. For whatever reason, using IP addresses seems to work most of the time, but not always (yahoo.com for example). TIA for any help! -- Richard Heyes