Can't access website via cURL from localhost, but can from hosted server.

Question

I'm writing a script that pulls XML data from wowarmory.com, using PHP 5 and cURL:

$url = "http://www.wowarmory.com";
$userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
$str  = "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\n";
$str .= "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\n";
$str .= "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n";
$str .= "Keep-Alive: 300\r\n";
$str .= "Connection: keep-alive\r\n";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array($str));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3000);
$xml = curl_exec($ch);

When I run this from my hosted web server, I get the XML response as expected. But when running from my localhost web server, I get nothing.

I can get any other website via cURL from localhost ( yahoo.com, even worldofwarcraft.com ), but not wowarmory.com. So I know cURL is functioning properly.

I'm using the following versions of PHP and cURL:

Hosted Server:

• php 5.2.6
• cURL libcurl/7.16.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7e zlib/1.2.3

Localhost:

• php 5.2.6
• cURL libcurl/7.16.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8i zlib/1.2.3

Any ideas?

EDIT: Localhost is running Windows XP SP3. I can access wowarmory.com through a web browser. Tracert starts timing out at hop 13 ( from my location, obviously ):

13   458 ms   529 ms   549 ms  0.so-6-0-0.BR1.LAX15.ALTER.NET [152.63.116.21]
14   476 ms   510 ms   488 ms  192.205.34.29
15   257 ms   279 ms   261 ms  cr1.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.128.14]
16   242 ms   259 ms   249 ms  gar5.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.128.25]
17   252 ms     *     1691 ms  12.122.255.74
18     *     2361 ms   634 ms  mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.lax1.attens.net [12.129.193.242]
19     *        *        *     Request timed out.

I'm not familiar with tcptraceroute, unfortunately.

The windows binary version of curl doesn't return anything for http://www.wowarmory.com/ but does for http://www.yahoo.com/

I don't have wget available.

EDIT 2: I can access my localhosted website just fine. It's just the response from curl I don't receive. I'm running a pretty much default XAMPP install ( apache 2 on windows xp ). All of this works fine.

Answer 1

Can you access it from your local host via a web browser or even via the curl or wget command line utilities?

What does tcptraceroute tell you?

If neither a web browser nor the command line utility work, but tcptraceroute works (and does not show a transparent proxy somewhere in the way), and you are behind a DSL link, it is possible that your problem is a PMTU blackhole. If that is the case, the workaround is MSS clamping.

Answer 2

Does

echo curl_error($ch);

return anything?