Solaris deployment issue

I have 5.2.3 installed on a number of solaris machines.  Everything seems to
be working correctly - or it did seem to until recently.  Last week we setup
monitoring software to try to see if each instance is running.  When we
tried to hit the instance at http://ip.address:port  we get nothing.  

If we go to it through the full URL, it works, but of course the
loadbalancer will send it to the next available instance, which gives us no
indication of how many are running, etc.

This seems to only be an issue on our solaris based servers.  The intel
based machines will let us go to address:port.

Any ideas?