I've been trying to setup a LAMP stack to use as a web development server and it's proving to be very frustrating for a novice like myself.
On a Fedora 16 machine, I've got Apache, MySQL, PHP, cURL, & Bind DNS installed and configured (though probably not quite correctly.) I've managed to get my CMS installed and working for a test site. That tells me Apache, PHP, & MySQL are working correctly.
However I'm running into a problem where the CMS used cURL to access an update server to do automatic updates as well as some other things (auto-installing add-ons.) WHen I try to enable this, I get an error that tells me to check that my server is running cURL (phpinfo tells me it is) and that allow_url_fopen is set to "On" (also true) and otherwise check with my web host to make sure outgoing connections for cURL are allowed.
Since I am the web host, I cannot seem to find the port I need to open up or settings I need to adjust to allow outgoing connections or even how to check what the current settings are. How do I check/allow outgoing connections for cURL?
Assuming you can SSH into your development machine, try to e.g. telnet to the update host, or to www.google.com port 80.
If that works, you will at least know you have access to the outside world. cURL then should have access to the outside world as well. Are you perhaps using a proxy to reach the internet? In that case, you will have to tell cURL about the proxy host and port. Are you doing any local firewalling on the development machine? Then make sure you allow outgoing traffic.