tnsnames.ora + Apache & symbolic links

I recently posted a question regarding connecting to a TNS service from PHP. I had been getting the error TNS operation timed out from PHP while connecting via sqlplus worked perfectly fine. If I was not using a TNS alias from PHP but a real connect string such as (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=127.0.0.1)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DAT A=(SID=qa))) it worked perfectly fine as well. I had a symbolic link pointing from $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin to tnsnames.ora file (cvs checked out version). After replacing the symbolic link with a hard link it worked fine. Is it that Apache does not follow the symbolic links outside of its home for security reasons? Florian http://fc.clever-soft.com http://www.clever-software-solutions.de