isError crashes on use in DB package

I'm updating a website and plan to change it from mysql to postgresql and figure this is a good project to get my feet wet with the pear DB package. Formerly I'd used either the mysql or postgresl functions built into php. I played around with a simple pear DB script doing a SELECT on my development laptop and have it working, but when I put the same script on my production webserver it fails (but it occasionally runs a time or two and then starts failing again). Both machines run the stable version of Debian (Woody), namely: apache 1.3.26 php 4.1.2 postgresql 7.2.1 The line in particular that is causing my script to fail is checking for errors on an object. Note that it's not failing on an error and executing the if statement, but rather executing isError seems to be causing the failure. if (PEAR::isError($db)) { or if (DB::isError($db)) { causes either a later error when I try to use the object in a query or I get (using lynx) 'Alert: Unexpected Network Read Error, connection aborted;' with no output to the browser. It's doesn't fail consistently, sometimes it runs, sometimes it crashes. Either one seems to work on my laptop. And if I comment out the error checking on the webserver script it runs fine, too. But, of course, I'd rather be checking for errors. I reloaded the php4 and the php4-pear packages on the webserver and restarted Apache and still get the same failures. My questions are: Which of the two error checking statements above should I be using. Does it matter? I'd guess since the object is created in the DB package that DB::isError would be the one, but the pear docs show it both ways in various places. How can I get the error checking code not to fail on the web server? Should I just give up on pear and go back to the php functions? Thanks for any suggestions... I've added the script on the end of this email just in case I'm doing something dumb..... brew <?php require_once 'DB.php'; $user = 'mode'; $pass = 'xxxxxxxx'; $host = ''; $db_name = 'mode'; // Data Source Name: This is the universal connection string $dsn = "pgsql://$user:$pass@$host/$db_name"; $db =& DB::connect($dsn); # this seems to be the offending line! if (PEAR::isError($db)) { die ($db->getMessage()); } $db->setFetchMode(DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC); print <<<EOS <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Pear Test</title> </head> <body> <center> <h2> This is a Pear Test </h2> <table> EOS; $sql = "SELECT * from users ORDER BY user_id LIMIT 40"; $result =& $db->query($sql); // Always check that $result is not an error # this seems to be another offending line! if (PEAR::isError($result)) { die ($result->getMessage()); } // Get each row of data on each iteration while ($row =& $result->fetchRow()) { $id = $row['user_id']; $email_adr = $row['email_adr']; print "<tr><td>$id</td><td>$email_adr</td></tr> \n"; } // You can disconnect from the database with: $db->disconnect(); ?> </table> </center> </body> </html> ========================================================================== Strange Brew (brew@theMode.com) Check out my Stock Option Covered Call website http://www.callpix.com and my Musician's Online Database Exchange http://www.TheMode.com ==========================================================================