I'm running the code on a Fedora Core 6 machine. I access the Internet directly, without any proxy server. I'm not using any firewall either.

With such situation, a) did it work from your browser? b) can you confirm the result of the following commands?

$ HEAD http://www.google.com/

# and

$  perl -MLWP::Simple -le 'print head "http://www.google.com" ? "OK" :
+ "NO"'
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