I am trying to get LWP::UserAgent to work on my system with a hostname. No matter what hostname I use I ALWAYS get the same error.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
   $ua->timeout(10);

my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'http://my.yahoo.com');
warn "Dump request: " . dump( $req );

my $res = $ua->request($req);
warn "Dump Response: " . dump( $res );

[download]

I get this error "500 Can't connect to my.yahoo.com:80 (Bad hostname 'my.yahoo.com')". It does not matter what hostname I use I always get the same result. If I use a specific IP then it will do a valid request but I want to make this work with DNS names.

The bizarre thing is that all the other utilities and my web browser don't seem to have a problem just LWP::UserAgent. I guess that I don't know where it is getting its environment information to determine the hostname.

I am using perl 5.8.8 on Ubuntu, does anyone have any ideas on what I can check?

Update: I decided to upgrade the libraries and noticed that it skipped some testings during the install. It skipped local/http.t and 3 others all with the same message (misconfigured system). If this is a systems issue, I know i am screwed because I have not been a SysAdmin for years.

In reply to LWP::UserAgent always complains about Hostname by Herkum

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