Subject Trouble getting php-interbase to work with PHP 5.4 on CentOS 7
Author Paul Vinkenoog
Hi all,

I've been struggling for days now to get php-interbase to work with PHP 5.4, without success.

It concerns a freshly installed CentOS 7 server with Firebird 2.5.3 Superclassic. I can make local connections with isql (both TCP/IP and embedded) as well als outward connections to other systems.

I can also connect from remote systems to Fb databases on the CentOS server, in as much as I configured the firewall to allow connections from those specific IP's.

All this is just to say that it isn't a network or firewall issue.

Firebird 2.5.3, php-5.4.16 and php-interbase have been installed from the CentOS repos. I installed an existing PHP application of mine that works fine on several other systems (Fedora, Windows...), but upon calling ibase_connect() I get:

Unable to complete network request to host "localhost". Failed to establish a connection.

I know php-interbase.so is loaded; otherwise I would get an 'unknown function' error. I can also read constants from the Interbase module and report them on the page.

Whether I prepend 'localhost:' to ibase_connect's $database argument or not, I get the same error message. The only difference: without 'localhost:', the page loads immediately and displays the error message; with it, it takes 2-4 seconds (obviously trying in vain to connect to localhost). Of course I also tried 127.0.0.1.

(I always do my database stuff before outputting the HMTL, hence the page load delay.)

Connections to remote systems, even if they have been configured to accept connections from the CentOS server and I can connect with isql, fail in the same way.

As a final resort, I removed Firebird 2.5.3 and installed the 2.5.4 RPM from firebirdsql.org (which I intended to do eventually anyway). But that didn't help either.

Obviously, php-interbase can't or won't make any connections to any system, including the local system. But I really don't know what to do next.

Does anybody have a clue? And does anybody have a working PHP 5.4 + php-interbase setup on a Linux server? If so, what kind of system is it?


Cheers,
Paul Vinkenoog