WordPress Update failure – nginx

Hi all,

I’m having a bit of a strange issue with updating wordpress, it’s reporting that it’s all up to date, however I know it’s not. Seems to be it just stopped detecting updates a few months ago and I’ve only just spotted it after realising that 4.5 is now available but not showing.

After checking all the obvious things and enabling wordpress logging which shows nothing but in nginx error logs I’ve noticed the following error messages:

2016/04/23 18:27:08 [error] 31640#31640: *21 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Warning:  An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the <a href="https://www.ads-software.com/support/">support forums</a>. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /home/robachickenweb/public_html/wp-includes/update.php on line 303
PHP message: PHP Warning:  An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the <a href="https://www.ads-software.com/support/">support forums</a>. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /home/robachickenweb/public_html/wp-includes/update.php on line 467
PHP message: PHP Warning:  An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the <a href="https://www.ads-software.com/support/">support forums</a>. (WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.) in /home/robachickenweb/public_html/wp-includes/update.php on line 123" while reading response header from upstream, client: 31.48.65.114, server: www.robachicken.co.uk, request: "GET /wp-admin/update-core.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock:", host: "www.robachicken.co.uk", referrer: "https://www.robachicken.co.uk/wp-admin/index.php"

I’m running CentOS 7, nginx 1.9.15 and PHP-FPM 5.4.16.

Previously I had an issue with the the firewall at the datacentre being a little overzealous and stopping oEmbeds and I had to change the http_request_timeout to get it working, but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference to this. To try to fix this, I’ve tried extending the PHP.ini default_socket_timeout to 600 and amending the nginx fastcgi_read_timeout to 600 and proxy_read_timeout to 600 but no success.

Does anyone have any ideas?