IPN fsocketopen failure

[freelance84]

Upon testing my PayPal IPN script, the paypal payment was recieved from payer to buyer, however the IPN script did not go any further than line 17... and therefore did not log any of the payment info into the designated mysql table, nor did it update anything else.

 

The following error was logged in the "error_log":

 

PHP Warning:  fsockopen()

[<a href='function.fsockopen'>function.fsockopen</a>]:

 

unable to connect to ssl://www.paypal.com:443

 

(Unable to find the socket transport "ssl" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?)

 

in /home/mysite/public_html/paypal_listener.php on line 17

 

This is the line in question on my IPN script:

$fp = fsockopen ('ssl://www.paypal.com', 443, $errno, $errstr, 30);

 

Completely new ground to me, but do i need to be getting the admins who host my site to enable this?

 

I read somewhere that:

The PHP function fsockopen() may not work because of firewall restrictions on the outgoing connections.

 

Any light on the issue would be brilliant here, bit lost.

[freelance84]

 

I've just viewed the phpinfo() on mysite, under the title "sockets" it says

 

Sockets Support enabled

 

[freelance84]

After further probing i found this https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1551

 

It states that some hosts do not support fsocketopen and some don't support curl.

 

I can only assume that mine does not support fsocketopen and therefore must edit my script for curl instead as upon a reply from paypal they assured me that the error was not on their side.

 

All in all i am so far pretty disapointed in the technical info that paypal gives out. Their technical team isn't too bad at responding to your questions but the std manuals are less than adequate.

 

Does anyone know of a way of determining if you host supports fsocketopen or curl or both for future reference