Don't know if this is an issue that others have hit up against, but we were stumped by this one for a day or so. We were testing the DB connection and all was well, but any attempt to pull content would hang up and result in a connection error. It finally dawned on me that our firewall/network setup here might somehow be interfering or simply that the domain name may not be resolving properly. I substituted the internal IP address of the server for the domain name portion of the API path and that put us in business.

So, instead of:

www.domain.com/path/to/ssp_director

we're using:

192.168.[n].[n]/path/to/ssp_director

Just a heads up to anyone having similar issues.

Obvious downside to this is that if our server ever moves to a different IP we'll have to fix this, but at least it's up and running!