How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the crawl-urlfilter.txt.
For those who happen upon this compendious thread, I traced my problem to DNS.
philfedora5 was hardcoded to 127.0.0.1 in the etc/hosts file. I added a host name of nutch and hardcoded it to my network card.
in nutch-default.xml I also made sure I had a value in the "http.agent.name" property.
<name>http.agent.name</name> <value>tomcatNutch</value>
