[Polarhome] PHP disabled functions

[Zoltan Arpadffy]

Hi,

As you probably noticed (and read in FAQ and Forum), polarhome.com PHP
engine on all hosts run with disabled functions mail(), fsockopen(),
pfsockopen().

It was necessary, because some of Romanian, Lithuanian and Slovenian
users abused the PHP easily usable mail functionality to send spam, mail
bombs etc.

>From other side thousands of users asked during last two three years for
this functionality, to be able to run an effective forum or to use mail
or socket functions in any other non malicious purpose.

So, I had an idea and made first design two years ago, but I was always
afraid to start implementation. Now I did it. About two days coding and
testing gave the final result. I made a patch to PHP source that allows
polarhome users to be distinguished from each other during runtime with
single PHP engine. Polarhome PHP allows disabled functions restrictions,
because of security reasons, for anonymous, non authenticated users and
in the same time removes restrictions for trusted, authenticated, shell
users.

It means that shell users are able to use PHP without functional
restriction.
Please note: SAFE_MODE is still on. 

For now (during two weeks test period) just Solaris and FreeBSD hosts
run new polarhome PHP engine, but in future all hosts should be
upgraded.

Regards, Z