I actually figured it out.
It's the freakish thing. The problem was with mysqlclient.so library. I am guessing a conflicting symbol. I upgraded mysqlclient.so and everything started working. I was running mysql version 5.0.27 and went up to 5.0.45, php was compiled with mysql support.
As of openssl security issues, this is RHEL 4, so they just patch the version..

Mike

----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
To: curl with PHP <curl-and-php_at_cool.haxx.se>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 4:56:31 AM
Subject: Re: Segmentation fault when using CURLOPT_SSLCERT,

On Sat, 17 Nov 2007, Mike R wrote:

> I have a problem with php/curl when using sslcert option.
> Without CURLOPT_SSLCERT everything works fine, as soon as i enable it
 I get a segmentation fault.

[...]

> [ssl_version] => OpenSSL/0.9.7a

This is a very old OpenSSL version. I think I counted *14* known
vulnerabilities in it...

> in a truss output the last few lines read
> :20651 read(4, "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n"..., 4096) = 1819
> 20651 read(4, "", 4096) = 0
> 20651 close(4) = 0
> 20651 munmap(0xb7d96000, 4096) = 0
> 20651 open("/tmp/key", O_RDONLY) = 4
> 20651 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1819, ...}) = 0
> 20651 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,
 MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7d96000
> 20651 read(4, "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n"..., 4096) = 1819
> 20651 --- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
> 20651 +++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

This reading is done by OpenSSL so it could imply a bug in there, so
 that's
yet another reason to try a newer version...

> When trying to reproduce the issue in development everything works
 just
> fine.

But are all components of the same version in that?

> I am guessing it's one of the libraries.. but i can't figure out
 which one.

Now we have a guess! ;-)

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