@pylon: Thanks! I did not see the persistent connection part. I have used those quite successfully with a joystick control from my Linux box to the ethernet shield, but it was a custom server, and not http based. I used a "stop byte" value to insure I got the whole transmission.
@OP: My bad. Is this a http based server, or a custom server? If it is a persistent http server, you may need to parse the response header for "Content-Length: 14". It may not be the same every time.
But you can't even connect, so this part doesn't even matter until you can connect to the server.