Recently my host turned on Safe Mode with the result my board gave an error. After some phonecalls he turned Safe Mode off for my site.

Now I want to install galllery2 on an other site and again I got into trouble because Safe mode was in effect

Why do some script don't work with safe mode on and why have some host Safe Mode turned on?
Do I have to convince my host to tun it off or does he have a point Safe Mode is used for security reasons?

Safe mode is garbage, really doesn't make too many things "safer", and is no longer going to be supported by PHP with PHP6.

With safe mode file writing becomes quite a pain due to restrictions imposed by PHP, so the userid and group ids have to match with the files that are present and the files being written to. Unfortunately, most times your FTP user (the one used to upload files) and your web user (the one the PHP process is running as) are different, so this becomes a problem.

I'd just turn it off personally...it's more trouble than it's worth.

Some more-restricted hosts don't even let you turn off safe mode, that's the problem for some people.

Thats what one of my hosts is doing

I would never get a host that has safe mode enabled personally.

Unfortunately, not sure what to say. We can support IPB on safe mode. Adam can get Gallery working on safe mode. But on a personal level, I wouldn't use a host that uses safe mode.

well, safe mode is so called safe, if the server admin actually spends time, they can make it safe by just looking thru php.ini and actually spending time to edit it