PHP5 interrupts data exchange with Flash

[necron]

Hi guys,

I have been working on this problem for 4 days now and I cannot figure out what causes it:

I moved a website that was built for us by somebody else from a server running PHP4 to a server running PHP5. The website makes use of Flash, which calls data from the PHP files and from a mysql database.

Ever since I moved the site it doesn't work correctly anymore. It seems that the data that is being called into the Flash file and in turn submitted back to PHP from Flash is not being exchanged. The setup of the two sites is exactly the same: same path, same URL, same permissions on files and folders. The only difference is that the old server ran PHP 4.3.4, while the new one has got PHP 5.1.2.

Unfortunately the programming of the site is a mess, so its a bit hard to understand how the exchange works, in particular as I do not have access to the source code (and the company that created the site has gone bust).

I was wondering whether anybody can think of a reason why PHP 5 could be creating difficulties with the data exchange, while PHP 4 was fine? Any differences between the two versions of PHP that I might have overlooked?

register_globals is turned on in the php.ini as it was for the old version of PHP.

Thanks for the feedback.

[mpb001]

Well using fiddler if you are on windows you can watch all communications between the browser and the server and vice versa.

http://www.fiddlertool.com/Fiddler/version.asp

Turn error reporting on on the server so you can see any errors thrown up as well in the responses. From what is sent and what you recieve you can build html forms that duplicate what the flash is doing if it is using post. Else you can see the constructed get requests and call them directly in the browser.

Before I found fiddler life was much harder. Can also be used with AJAX, Applets and anything else that does remote connections.

If you are not using windows there might be something else like it.

Have fun reverse engineering 🙂