Ugh. That hadn't occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense. So the reason PHP and mod_perl can do persistent connections but cgi applications can't is that the former are run as Apache and the latter are run outside of Apache? I know that's not the most technical explanation, but is that the ballpark idea?

Re: symlink - I don't think it's a symlink issue. I've got enough experience successfully including and requiring files from all over the place that I think I would have encountered it before.

Re: cgi-bin - That's about the only idea that makes sense to me at this point, albeit without any real understanding of why that might be a problem.

Surely you know a lot more about security and server configurations, but it seems like a perfectly reasonable "feature" to me (although it would certainly be better if it worked properly). I mean, the intent behind open_basedir restrictions is that I shouldn't be able to write a script that accesses files owned by any other user on the same server. But maybe I'm missing something - you think it's a less-than-ideal way of accomplishing those security requirements?

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