btw,

if anyone else is experiencing network wonkiness trying to connect to eligius, you might want to consider a proxy.  if you have servers at one site that are connecting reliably and another site that is failing to connect to mining.eligius.st even though ping works, you can try setting up an ssh tunnel to eligius through your working hosts.  this has helped a few individuals and I have no idea what is going on from a network perspective on the server end.

if you do not have a remote host that is working, and you are experiencing connectivity issues and you are sure that the pool is up (according to the website), you can try doing what I did...

Install Tor, get it running, say, on the default port 9050... then fire off socat like this in another terminal:
socat TCP4-LISTEN:8399,fork SOCKS4A:localhost:mining.eligius.st:8337,socksport=9050

once socat is up (there will not be output to the console), simply direct your miners to localhost:8399 and you should get in without problems.  I have been running like this for several hours now and have seen zero negative impact to hashrate or invalid counts.  This has completely eliminated my issue of idle miners.