running multiple instances of FA from the same code base

Hi Folks,

I might find myself in a situation at some point in the near future where I will want a few instances of FA on the same server, where each instance appears as a standalone instance to each of it's users.  I am thinking it might be a good idea to try and run each of these instances from one code base.

I have done this before with Mediawiki; basically it is done by having a folder with the code, then symlink all the files in that directory to the DocumentRoot.  Remove the links to the site specific files and create them for each instance, and then use the apache config to export an environmental variable that configures mediawiki to run from a hardcoded install path.

I tried similar with FA; the files are stored in /usr/src/fa, the DocumentRoot is /var/ww/fa.  link all files in /usr/src to /var/www, rm company, lang, modules, sql, themes, and tmp from /var/www/ and copy them from /usr/src into /var/www.  Set permissions, etc, and the installer ran without problems.

When logging in, though, only the front page shows, and the logs clearly show that it cannot find the config files due to them being referenced by a relative path from /usr/src that do not lead to the site specific config files in /var/www.

I tried hardcoding $path_to_root in index.php  with /var/www/fa, but that messes the browser's URL and doesn't work.  setting it to / also doesn't work.

Wondering if there is a trick that can make path_to_root always work from an absolute path like /var/www/fa instead of a relative one like .?  or is the experiment doomed to fail?