This is my second trip to the blinux list today and my thanks to all for making it a good list. I have been trying off and on to use php under FreeBSD to send queries to a SQL data base on a Pinnacle server. Most people use php in web development, but I am interested in using it to send sql commands to an Oracle server running Oracle8I. The version of php is php4.3.4 and my problem is that I can not seem to get php to understand that the SQL server is on a remote system. There is a configuration file called tnsnames.ora which describes the server's IP address and host name. I have put that file just about anywhere that remotely makes sense plus a few places that really don't and the result is always the same. php starts looking locally and, of course, finds nothing and then gives up. The format of the command I am testing with right now is $conn= ora_logon("username@servername" , "password"); ?> We do successfully query a Microsoft data base using PHP so I know it works for that. If this story is familiar to anybody, please tell me what I am probably not doing or doing wrong. Also, if there is a good resource I can read, that would help tremendously. The documentation for PHP is a thousand times better than earlier versions, but it is primarily geared toward people using php in web servers. If there is another utility better suited to working remotely with Oracle SQL, I would be happy to know about it. What we are doing is trying to get data from the Oracle server, put it in to programs and scripts, and then send a completion value back to the Oracle server. So far, we are stuck fast. Even though this is a Linux list, many of the FreeBSD packages work very similarly. Thanks for any good ideas. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list