A Note for the PHP Manual's MSSQL page
(because it won't accept my submission at the moment)

When you edit freetds.conf, you are defining named interfaces that you can use 

*in place of* ip addresses in your scripts. This is essential if you are 

communicating with MS SQL Server 2000 or better, because you need to up the tds 

version of the connection to 8.0.



In /etc/freetds.conf:



[MYTDS]

        host = 10.0.17.71

        port = 1433

        tds version = 8.0



In PHP scripts:



$db = mssql_connect ("MYTDS", "sa", "admin");



I was getting all kinds of Unicode-related errors until I finally grokked that 

you could use the name in place of the ip address in order to use a defined 

connection with a higher version specified.

That is all.