a security problem

i'm a www-admin at arena.sci.univr.it, [i think to have done a wrong thing to send this msg to you; but i don't know to whom send some msg that is different to a bug, and the faq are useless to my problem] we have compiled apache 1.3.3 and php 3.0.5 as a module for apache. we also have installed postgresql i wish to use some database in my php scripts, root told me that if i want to connect to postgres server (that is resident on arena), i've got to do it with login autentification. it means that i write on my php files my login and passwd. (thing that i don't want to do, because it offers the possibility to all to enter in the system). if, in a php file, i do " echo $USER", the response is "root"; and if i read some files from php, it tells me that it cannot because of a "warning: permission denied", (if i change permissions to -rwx------). what's your response ? thanks dimitri giardina