So, today I faced a new challenge at work. Yesterday we updated one of our linux boxes from RedHat 3 to RedHat 5. The server was hosting a web application that takes data both from a mysql database (for content management) and oracle 7.3 (for corporative data).

The access from php to Oracle 7.3 was being done with a php module called oci 8 (http://es.php.net/oci8) that relied on an oracle client being properly installed on the machine.