PHP Oracle8 Linux long varchar

I have a web-based tool programmed in PHP using Oracle8. One of the tables for this app includes a varchar column with a maximum of 2000 characters. This has worked for years on a Solaris server. Recently we moved to a Linux server and this no longer works. The user provides data for this long varchar column in a text box which is then added to the table with an INSERT command. On the Linux server, when the the text size is greater than 245 characters one of a few things happen:

- the text of the next column in the database is appended to the large text field.
- IE throws a server not found error.
- the query silently fails and stops the PHP script at that point.

I have no error message. Anyone have any clue?

 

The problem was with the Linux Oracle Client. We upgraded to 11g and things are now working. The reason I could not get ahead of the problem was that the script had a segmentation fault in the PHP Oracle library or Oracle client and silently died. I found the problem by recreating the problem using a perl script which showed the core dump values following the segmentation fault.