micahdg

@teraßyte I downgraded to php 8.1 and see the same results 😞 Great idea, though.
@Stuart Silvester I see what you're talking about now - that 4.x reference means the requirements check isn't able to connect to the urls below, either. For some reason I thought I inadvertently resolved that issue a few days ago, but in fact I just hadn't refreshed the ips4.php file until after downgrading php to 8.1.
I was able to get more precise google search results using "php8 file_get_contents Failed to open stream: Permission denied in" and found the suggestion that SELinux is causing the problem, so I executed the following two commands:
These commands appear to give apache access to the network and internet. And now the install script can reach the license server 😄
So in the end, it was my own local security issue even though curls worked great. I confess I'm not super familiar with SELinux.
Thank you for your patience and assistance! Hopefully this rabbit trail helps someone else in the future. This is all running on CentOS Stream 9, rhel 9 on a DigitalOcean vps.