Getting error code 28 with cURL - php

Question

THIS HAS BEEN SOLVED - SEE ANSWER AT THE END OF THIS POST
I am trying to retrieve data from a remote server using PHP / cURL
If I put the following URL into a browser the data comes back correctly.
http://realm103.c7.castle.wonderhill.com/api/map.json?user%5Fid=5245274&x=375&y=375&timestamp=1310554325&%5Fsession%5Fid=5b2070a46a083a33e053d60dbc2d062e&dragon%5Fheart=098d2deb0a37f18c97428d636c456572f9bade24&version=3
However when I try to access if with PHP / cURL it just times out (error code 28).
$json = curl($jsonurl, $realm['intRealmID'], $realm['strRealmServer']);
function curl($url, $realm, $realmServer){
$header = array();
$header[] = 'Host: realm'.strval($realm).'.'.$realmServer.'.castle.wonderhill.com';
$header[] = 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8';
$header[] = 'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5';
$header[] = 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate';
$header[] = 'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7';
$header[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
return curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
Anybody have any ideas why it works from the browser but not via cURL? Thanks
ADDITIONAL INFO
Whilst cURL isn't working for the URL above. For the URL below it works just fine. The only difference is the server the data is being requested from. The data itself and POST is identical.
http://realm4.c5.castle.wonderhill.com/api/map.json?user%5Fid=1053774&x=375&y=375&timestamp=1310616808&%5Fsession%5Fid=5b2070a46a083a33e053d60dbc2d062e&dragon%5Fheart=f35f476facab91f0e901eaf2209a0c8a9b9bedcc&version=3
ANSWER
Finally back to this and found that the referrer was the problem. The server was expecting to see no referrer in the request header. When it did the request was blocked. That behaviour probably was not consistent across all servers at the time but it is now. Removing the referrer from the request header and leaving everything else the same now works.

Answer 1

The biggest difference between your cURL function and requesting the information directly is the CURLOPT_HEADER property, I would first try removing this from the code.

Answer 2

try this
function get_data($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
$returned_content = get_data('your url');
Alternatively, you can use the file_get_contents function remotely, but many hosts don't allow this
$userAgent = ‘Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0’;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
Some other options I use:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
try this:
$ctx = stream_context_create( array(
'socket' => array(
'bindto' => '192.168.0.107:0',
)
));
$c= file_get_contents('http://php.net', 0, $ctx);