installing HTTP_Request

First, all I'm trying to do in a PHP script is check whether a remote URL exists or not (gives 404). I'm under the impression that installing HTTP_Request is the easiest way to do this; am I right so far? Now, I'm getting problems trying to install it. My machine has CentOS 4.5 and PHP 4.3.9. I'm getting this error when trying to install HTTP_Request: [root@D2585 ~]# pear install HTTP_Request Notice: Undefined index: st in RPC.php on line 292 downloading HTTP_Request-1.4.2 ... Starting to download HTTP_Request-1.4.2 (-1 bytes) ...done: 0 bytes could not extract the package.xml file A Google search for that error turns up a lot of pages of people asking about it but nothing I could find that said what to do about it. Any ideas? -Bennett