Plugin API HTTP Error (timeout fix doesn’t resolve issue)

Anytime that wordpress tries to link outside of the site, for example the “WordPress Development Blog” on the Dashboard. I get this error:

RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: Could not open handle for fopen() to http://wordpress.org/development/feed/

Also, when attempting to upgrade Akismet, as it’s one of the two default included plugins (only two installed), it gives me this error:

An Unexpected HTTP Error occurred during the API request.

Try again

I searched for these errors ahead of time, found that there is a post about this second error, here. However the “fix” of allowing more time for the page to process before the site times-out changing the 5 to 30 did not fix the error (nor to 45). There was a post on there that said to add a print_r statement in to find out what the error was, however there was no follow up discussion on what to do next. There was a mention to check to see if fsocket() was enabled in the php.ini file; it is.

I’m running the server on our company’s intranet. It’s an ubuntu server box with it’s own domain. The box has access to the internet, we’ve been able to download and install things like… wordpress… directly from the internet to the server. There are other sites on the server that access the internet, which all work correctly.