Security and privacy

Hello guys, this is yet another "The site administrator needs to fix the file permissions" error.

After a not-so-happy experience of being not able to login , ref : http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=149826 , i managed to bypass this by using db sessions.

However, when i try to create a new course, i am gettign the following error :

ERROR: Could not find or create a directory (/var/www/moodledata/11)

The site administrator needs to fix the file permissions

As obvious as it is, here are some of the things i tried :

1 - i tried to create another folder for moodle data and change the /var/www/html/config.php to link to that folder - same error

2 - in httpd.conf , check what username apache is running under - then chown -R apache moodledata - samer error

3 - chmod 777 or 775 to moodledata - samer error

4 - ls -l on /var/www gives : drwxrwxrwx for moodle data aka it is a directory where everything is readable and writable

5 - check in php.ini - if safe mode is off - it is off

6 - check via filezilla if can create folder-upload files moodledata folder : successful

7 - check permissions in filezilla to 777 or 755

in the error log files of apache , i find this line :
PHP Warning: File upload error - unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0, referer: http://servername/user/editadvanced.php

I'd be grateful for anyone with more suggestions to try .

From the above - the conclusion i have so far :
We are able to write to the moodledata folder - changing the folder doesn't solve the problem , the problem is that moodle is trying to use the web user account to create the folder but then cannot . however, i checked what user apache is using , made it the owner of the moodledata folder and made sure php safe mode is off - that should have solved the problem...but un-luckily - doesn't seem so .

I appreciate if you can give me any feedback on the points above... if any idea / light bulb went over your head, please let me know

thanks in advance