Well, there's your problem. Your network isn't defined, so the machine can't connect to anywhere. And even if it could, your resolv.conf is empty, so it wouldn't know about any DNS servers for name...
Here is the C source code for a demo program written by me which does pretty much what you want to do. I tested it on a vanilla Centos 5.2 box. It uses DBUS to talk to HAL and Glib's ...