MSSQL VIA FreeTDS, ODBC, and Cpanel Unknown host machine name (severity 2) - php

Question

I have installed FreeTDS 0.91, ODBC, on a Cpanel server running Centos 6.5x64. Everything appears to be running fine and I can connect to the remote MSSQL 2012 server using:
/usr/local/freetds/bin/tsql -S sqlserver -U test -P mypassword
and succesfully execute queries in the database.
I can also connect through:
isql -v sqlserverdatasource test mypasswordhere
But for some reason /usr/local/freetds/bin/tsql -LH server.ip.here
returns no information or errors which doesn't make much sense when it is proven I can connect with the other methods above.
So now when running a test script from a cpanel account on the machine I get:
Unknown host machine name (severity 2)
Here is the test script:
//Database connection function.
function getConnection() {
try {
//$dbconnect = new PDO("sqlserver:Server=server.ip.here,1433;Database=dbname", "user", "password");
$dbconnect = new PDO("dblib:host=server.ip.here,1433;dbname=dbname", 'user', 'password');
} catch (PDOException $e) {
echo "CONNECTION ERROR.<br>Error message:<br><br>" . $e->getMessage();
die();
}
if (!$dbconnect) {
die('Cant connect to database. Please try again later!');
}
else{
echo "i'm in!";
return $dbconnect;
}
}
The first commented line is the old one using sqlserv which I found did not work at all from what i can tell because of the x64 OS. I have also tried with "" around user and pass as well as no marks at all.
php -m does show PDO and pdo-dblib.
Any ideas where I can look next?
Update: This was fixed. I missed in freetds.conf:
[global]
# TDS protocol version
tds version = 8.0
It was originally set to 4.5 instead of 8.

Answer 1

The fix for me was with three steps:
First, I edited /etc/freetds/freetds.conf and changed the tds version like this:
tds version = 8.0
The second step was not entering port number. The port was already 1433, and not specifying it fixed the exact same issue on my case.
Lastly, to connect properly, I had to restart networking as #user1054844 mentioned as this:
/etc/init.d/networking restart
After all these steps, I was able to connect and work with the SQL Server database.

Answer 2

You actually did not need ODBC at all since your connect script is using pdo_dblib not odbc. You can just install FreeTDS than enable pdo_dblib via the compile time flag in rawopts and rebuild via EasyApache. Of course cPanel specifics for this are a bit different.
I just did this for a friend and decided to document it since it is hard to find accurate clear information for FreeTds and pdo_dblib on cPanel.
Guide is here: FreeTDS And pDO_dblib On cPanel