Seems like safe mode isn't all that interesting a solution anyway, according to this discussion on the Gallery site. Apparently, for example, even the creator of PHP doesn't rate safe mode. The far better solution is to chroot the Apache environment which is something I've been putting off for ages. Right now it's not a big threat as none of the users are actively malicious...

[Thanks to Jez for the URL.]

Drunken Rob and DC touching your box? damn your brave!

never knew ctf could be so much fun.

last time i threw a challenege like that... i lost... and quickly. so quick in fact that, i didnt have a chance to backup the data before someone decided to take it futher by dropping one of mySQL databases!