sockets (long)

Hey all, People who have been recieving this list for a while may remember me going through all this a while back, so I am not really a newbie when using sockets. I am basically trying to rewrite my Online Credit Card Verification (OCV) client with the new socket functions. In thoery the following should work: --- example1 socket functions ---- $socket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); $conn = connect($socket, some_ip_address, some_port); set_nonblock($socket); $packet = "a request"; write($socket, $packet, some_length); $start = time(); $buffer = ""; while ( empty($buffer) && (time() < $start + 30 )) { read($socket, $buffer, some_length); } This does not work will hang until the script times out (max execution time is exceeded). ----- exampe 2 network and file system functions ----- $socket = fsockopen (some_address, some_port, $errno, $errstr, 30); set_socket_blocking($socket, 0); $packet = "a request"; fputs ($socket, $packet); $start = time(); while ( empty($buffer) && (time() < $start + 30 )) { $buffer = fgets($socket, some_length); } Works! After 30 seconds fgets is timed out. The lengths I am reading and writing are correct as all request and response lengths are pre-determined. I cannot use set_socket_blocking($socket, 0) in example 1 instead of set_nonblock($socket) as it will generate an errora s follows: Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle resource ... I believe that in example 1 the socket is not being set to nonblock mode? Can anyone verfiy this, give me a better way, or maybe just put me out of my misery :-) Regards, Joseph