I couldn't for the life of me get a certain php script working when i moved my server to a new Fedora 4 installation. The problem was that fopen() was failing when trying to access a file as a URL through apache -- even though it worked fine when run from the shell and even though the file was readily readable from any browser. After trying to place blame on Apache, RedHat, and even my cat and dog, I finally ran across this bug report on Redhat's website:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=164700
Basically the problem was SELinux (which I knew nothing about) -- you have to run the following command in order for SELinux to allow php to open a web file:
/usr/sbin/setsebool httpd_can_network_connect=1
To make the change permanent, run it with the -P option:
/usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1
Hope this helps others out -- it sure took me a long time to track down the problem.