Joshua Ostrom – riafan

While integrating some backend services needed by our RIA I ran across a small hiccup that was easily fixed but I thought I’d post in case someone else get’s stumped by this (apparently some already have ).

Problem:

PHP needed access to and ODBC connection that pointed to a dBase III database on a remote server. While local applications could use this ODBC connection flawlessly, connection via PHP failed.

Symptons:

Warning: odbc_connect() [function.odbc-connect]: SQL error: [Microsoft][ODBC dBase Driver] ‘(unknown)’ is not a valid path.

Solution:

You need to enable rights for the Apache Service to have access to the remote directory.

For my particluar situation the server running apache and php was not part of the domain, so I simply right clicked on the apache service, navigated to the Log On tab and selected “This Account” (and filled in the administrator credentials) as opposed to the default “Local System Account.”