include_path, permissions question

Hello, I'd greatly appreciate some help with some problems I'm hitting. I have a site set up on a dev server and it works fine. In transferring it to the clients server, it's getting all weird. When I first transferred created files, the owner was "joe". And they worked fine. When I republished those files using fwrite, the owner changed to "httpd". And includes and file_get_contents stopped working. I tried changing the owner, but couldn't. I changed include_path. I turned on error reporting and got: Warning: include(includes/common.php): failed to open stream: Inappropriate ioctl for device in /**/local/home/**/dev.**.net/alb**acl.php on line 5 Warning: file_get_contents(): SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. The script whose uid/gid is 398/398 is not allowed to access includes/lyrics_box_scripts.txt owned by uid/gid 191739/191739 in /**/local/home/**/dev.**.net/alb**acl.php on line 11 Thanks in advance for any assistance. -dg