I am very stuck and would greatly appreciate any help.

We have two servers and up to today I have been able to connect to them fine though the connection code is different for the two servers.  Also I sometimes connect in the shell of SSH, and sometimes in php pages.

Connection code for the first server is as follows (where username and password are replaced as appropriate):
In the shell:
mysql -h localhost --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock2 -u username -p password
In php:
$dbh = mysql_connect("localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock2", "username", "password");

Connection code for the second server is:
In the shell:
mysql -h localhost --socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock -u username -p password
In php:
$dbh = mysql_connect("localhost:/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock ", "username", "password");

Now the last of these has stopped working, and I cannot see why.

On the second server I can connect in the shell as shown above, but when I try to connect in the php code with the same uname and pword I get the error message

Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock ' (111) in /home/www/adminoffice/public_html/hold/erfn/erfncreate.php4 on line 31

Any suggestions as to what might have gone wrong would save my sanity
TIA.

Question - what changed at the time it stopped working?   Was a new version of MySQL (4.0.12 production came out recently) or PHP (There's a 4.3.2 Release Candidate around) installed?  Were any other configurations changed?

Nothing shouts at me as obvious ... if sql.safe_mode has been enabled, the PHP user name and password you give are ignored; connection attempted as the user name under which PHP is running, no password.  A long shot, but has someone reconfigured the PHP and thought that enabling a "safe mode" woul dbe a good idea  

Thanks for the reply.  It seems to be sorted now - I still do not know what was going wrong, I cannot see a mistake in the code - but probably my fault somewhere along the line.

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