@mlarrabee:

can't seem to find the php.ini file to make changes. Can someone point out where it would have been installed by default
/etc/php.ini on a Mandrake box here at home.

That's what I thought but it doesn't exist there on my Linode, but PHP still works.

locate php.ini

I've seen a few distros put it with the other apache conf files.

Built up the locate database and ran it looking for the file but it still didn't find it…odd.

Search results:

[root@localhost share]# locate php.ini
/usr/share/doc/libphp_common430-430/php.ini-recommended
/usr/share/doc/libphp_common430-430/php.ini-dist
[root@localhost share]#

Yet php is running because I can run php pages through Apache2 and they work fine.

@mlarrabee:

Built up the locate database and ran it looking for the file but it still didn't find it…odd.
Then do as root

find . -name php.ini

Well, if you can still run PHP, write a phpinfo() script, and the first info block will tell you what php.ini file it's using.

For instance, I've got Gentoo running with php installed as a module, and the default location for me is: /etc/php/apache2-php4/php.ini

To get /etc/php.ini on Mandrake, you need to install the php-ini package. Otherwise, by default, PHP on Mandrake is set up to use /etc/php/ as a directory containing many different INI files, which it uses in addition to /etc/php.ini, but it does also use /etc/php.ini as well.

Hope this helps. :)