I have a mysterious PHP SOAP error on my host, but can't duplicate locally

Question

I've run across an interesting PHP/SOAP error that has me stymied. After searching I have not found a plausible explanation, and I'd appreciate your help. Here's the background:

I have a site built in PHP/CodeIgniter which uses SOAP to communicate over SSL with a back-end system provided by a third party (let's call them "Company X" to protect the innocent), not in my control. In the spirit of good MVC, I put the code specific to interacting with that data source in a separate model, as in system/application/models/company_x.php. I have been developing locally using MAMP on my Mac, and just about everything was relatively smooth through testing and development, including calling Company X's web service over SSL. I should probably mention that their web service had strange WSDL that PHP 5's SOAP didn't like (things like required parameters that were not there), so it's been a little odd to call SOAP methods very explicitly, but I got it going and it worked through testing. I even deployed it to a test site at Mosso, and I could have sworn that it worked for a time up there too.

Imagine my surprise when every call to the SOAP web service starting producing errors like this:

    A PHP Error was encountered
    Severity: Warning
    Message: SoapClient::__doRequest() [soapclient.--dorequest]: 
    WARNING: URL fopen access
    Filename: models/company_x.php
    Line Number: 86

The error logs didn't give any more information, other than the full path to the model file on the server. OK, I thought, it works locally and I thought it worked on Mosso before, maybe Mosso changed their settings and disabled SOAP or something. A little PHPInfo later, and nope, they have more than enough. I thought that maybe my Mac is more tolerant of the SSL certificate, after all it's a GoDaddy *.domain.com cert, maybe fopen is having trouble getting through. I whipped up a test file to connect over SSL and put it on Mosso and it worked.

So I'm wondering: why is fopen access suddenly a problem for SOAP? What is it about Mosso that is making this difficult suddenly? Do I need to override some INI setting? Could it be, like is so often with unhelpful errors like this, something completely different?

Update: here is the configure command from phpinfo():

'./configure' '--build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--program-prefix=' '--prefix=/usr' '--exec-prefix=/usr' '--bindir=/usr/bin' '--sbindir=/usr/sbin' '--sysconfdir=/etc' '--datadir=/usr/share' '--includedir=/usr/include' '--libdir=/usr/lib64' '--libexecdir=/usr/libexec' '--localstatedir=/var' '--sharedstatedir=/usr/com' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--cache-file=../config.cache' '--with-libdir=lib64' '--with-config-file-path=/etc' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d' '--disable-debug' '--with-pic' '--disable-rpath' '--without-pear' '--with-bz2' '--with-curl' '--with-exec-dir=/usr/bin' '--with-freetype-dir=/usr' '--with-png-dir=/usr' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--without-gdbm' '--with-gettext' '--with-gmp' '--with-iconv' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr' '--with-openssl' '--with-png' '--with-pspell' '--with-expat-dir=/usr' '--with-pcre-regex=/usr' '--with-zlib' '--with-layout=GNU' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-trans-sid' '--enable-yp' '--enable-wddx' '--with-kerberos' '--enable-ucd-snmp-hack' '--with-unixODBC=shared,/usr' '--enable-memory-limit' '--enable-shmop' '--enable-calendar' '--enable-dbx' '--enable-dio' '--with-ming' '--with-mime-magic' '--with-sqlite=shared' '--with-libxml-dir=/usr' '--with-xml' '--with-system-tzdata' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--without-mysql' '--without-gd' '--without-odbc' '--disable-dom' '--disable-dba' '--without-unixODBC' '--disable-pdo' '--disable-xmlreader' '--disable-xmlwriter' '--disable-json'

Also, note my comment below that phpinfo() reports that furl is allowed. Weird!

Answer 1

You might have this http://us.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#ini.allow-url-fopen

missing.

Remember, you can always use phpinfo() to visually compare the environment between machines.

Answer 2

Another possibility (from the PHP docs):

Note: When safe mode is enabled, PHP checks whether the directory in which the script is operating has the same UID (owner) as the script that is being executed.

EDIT: Hmm.. I don't see safe mode in your PHP compile options so it's probably not that.

Answer 3

OK, a little update on this problem: the error mysteriously disappeared without any change from me. I will have to assume that there was some odd configuration error on Mosso that was silently fixed. It is also remotely possible that there was a problem with Company X's setup. That is the worst kind of fix IMO! Thanks anyway to everyone who looked in on this.