PHP/MySQL issue after security update 2010-005

Trianglejuice, THANK YOU! I've spent several days trying to fix this to no avail, but your directions fixed it in a nano-second! I'm eternally grateful.
Peter V.

@everyone, glad I could help. It was the error log that helped me finding this solution.

As for the solution that etresoft suggested: I guess if you like defaults, then you should go for this one. However, I don't think there's any harm in having a php.ini file 🙂

BUT: I read somewhere that having your MySQL socket in the "tmp" directory could be a security problem. I'm not a security expert, so I leave it to you which one of the suggested solutions you use.

Thanks for your fix, that did the trick!

I am going to have to retract one of my earlier suggestions. It turns out that you do need a MySQL config file to use the non-default socket path in /var/mysql. My hacked up launchd plist file sets the proper path in the MySQL server, but client libraries such as PHP, Perl, and mysql still can't find the server. The client socket path is still in /tmp. So, my new launchd plist file looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>KeepAlive</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
 <string>--user=mysql</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

and I have a brand-new /etc/my.cnf file that has only:

[client]
socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock
[mysqld]
socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock

Unfortunately, that still wasn't enough. The Perl DBD apparently has the /tmp path hard-coded. I had to add ":mysql_socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock" to my connection string. Now I have it running with some very funky PHP and Perl code.