For those who might run into the same problem in the future: If functions like "mysql_db_name" are not working and you get no mysqlerr, then most likely your PHP installation is messed up. Maybe you see the same behavior than we: phpinfo shows old and wrong stuff in the first section, i.e. an old servername or the wrong PHP version even if you installed a different one. phpinfo must never show wrong information! In our case PHP is static compiled with Apache, I guess the Apache installation was not clean either. This kind of error is easy to see if you install phpMyAdmin: you do not even get the index page. We finally connected to a running MySQL database on a production server, got the same result and could therefore isolate the problem - PHP or the combination Apache/PHP. We run Solaris 2.8 on a Netra T1 AC200 and we are not familiar to this system yet. And we did more than one installation on this machine, maybe one or more were not correct. Since a complete new install of Apache/PHP/MySQL on a other Sun (X1) worked, we knew what to do: Delete all previous installations of Apache and PHP. Make a fresh and empty /usr/local/ directory. delete all config files you might have in different locations. Unpack the downloads - all latest stable - only with gtar (important!) and compile only with gcc (important!). Now we are up and running, just the PHP library for dynamic image generation could not been installed - we are working on it. Richard Lynch, thank you for your help. Your guess that there are accidently different libraries involved, pointed us in the right direction. Peter Ostry -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]