[wp-hackers] Heads-up for people debugging fopen/etc. issues internally on PowWeb...

[David Chait]

Since I just ran into this, though others in the developer community might 
find this info useful.

PowWeb, in their infinite wisdom, has implemented some kind of 
load-balancing solution for their websites. This has the side effect of 
basically locking-up any internal fopen/etc. request from a powweb page FOR 
a powweb page, using 'normal' URL conventions.

The solution (spent 10 minutes in the powweb forums looking at PHP Q&A) is 
to rewrite internal requests to use 'localhost'.

So if you want to reference:
http://www.somesite.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
... internally from powweb and somesite is on powweb, it must be rewritten
http://localhost.somesite.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
... when trying to fopen/fsockopen/etc. that page.  I'm not altogether sure 
if it is only the case if trying to fopen a somesite.com page FROM 
somesite.com code (i.e. a site trying to fopen URLs to itself...), or if 
it's a PowWeb-wide issue (i.e., a powweb site fopening a URL to another 
powweb site).

Since it was causing an issue for a guy trying to aggregate his own feed 
(using my CG-FeedRead plugin), I just figured others might want to know. 
Don't know if it's useful enough to want to go into the Wiki or not. ;)

-d