PHP4, unixODBC and Apache on Linux

Hi, My name is Ludwig Gamache. At work, we are presently using php3. But I am in charge of changing our working version to php4. We are currently using apache 1.3.9 with unixODBC 1.8.7 and php3 and it is working. Our DB is on Sybase ASE and we use the unix drivers 11.9.2. But now, I have a weird problem. I try to install unixODBC (1.8.13, I also tried 1.8.7) with php4 (last source) and Apache 1.3.12 from a Debian package. I have to use the Debian packages of Apache. Do not ask me to recompile apache (But in case you ask, we also tried to recompile it but it was crashing at the exact same place). I also have to use the Apache-Dev package to have apxs. I first compiled unixODBC with this configuration: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/unixODBC --disable-gui --disable-drivers --enable-thread=yes (we also tried to disable threads) Then I compiled PHP4 with this config: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php4test --with-unixODBC=/usr/local/unixODBC --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs --enable-debug We first tested the server with the basic httpd.conf, access.conf and srm.conf. We first got a problem with the permissions on /root. If we do not give 755 permissions to /root and /root/odbc.ini, apache crashes if we load a page that need ODBC connects. If we do not use ODBC the server is not crashing. We think that it is purely an unixODBC problem. It looks for the user that is running the server (nobody) and try to open in read/write mode the home of the parent process (that is owned by root). We solved the problem by looking into gdb and strace. We saw that it was looking for permissions on lot of files. So we had to set them to 755. We do not like this kind of permissions but at least it works. Anyone has any idea how to solve this permission problem by another way? Then, we used our own apache configuration files. And it crashed again. As soon as we try to start it, it was crashing. So it was not another odbc problem. We found that when using ErrorLog in the VirtualHost Config, it was crashing the system, even if it was working with unixODBC and php3. If we comment the line, the server runs perfectly. Here is our VirtualHost config. <VirtualHost xxx.xxx.xx.xx> ServerAdmin webmaster@there.com DocumentRoot /var/www/www.there.com DirectoryIndex index.html index.phtml index.php3 index.php index.htm index.shtml ServerName www.there.com #ErrorLog /var/log/apache/error-www.there.com.log CustomLog /var/log/apache/Ncsa-www.there.com.log combined ErrorDocument 404 http://www.there.com/ ErrorDocument 403 http://www.there.com/ </VirtualHost> At the end of the httpd.conf file, we had to place those lines: SetEnv SYBASE /opt/sybase-11.9.2 SetEnv HOME /var/odbc Also, Debian is stille using the old way for the config files (3 (httpd, access, srm) files instead of 1 (httpd)). May this cause any problem? I did not want to post all our httpd.conf config since it has more than 300 lines but if you need any part, I will be glad to mail it. If we do not load the PHP4 module it works, if we load the php3 module it works. We tried to disable a lot of our modules but the problem was the same. Any idea? If you have any question about this problem, I will be glad to answer on what we did. We do not think that this is a normal situation. Apache should work since it is a directive. So, we wonder if this is the only thing that will crash the server. We know that there is 1 problem. But there could be more. Anyone ever saw that kind of problem? Thanks Ludwig Gamache