[tex-live] OT2 vs. T2A; compilation by apache user issues

[mario chiari]

Hi

my first post to a tex list after ages.

I have been using now and then a 2010 install of texlive (on a Linux -
Fedora 17 machine) without a issue.
Now I have a issue and I am back. 

I need to type cyrillic within a italian/english text.

I use 
\usepackage[OT2,T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage[american,russian,italian]{babel}
and define:
\newcommand\cyrillic{%
\renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr}%
\renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss}%
\renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2}%
\normalfont
\selectfont}
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyrillic}

Everything works fine, but when I need something like
\section{\textcyr{}}. 

So, my first question, how do I fix that?

I have hacked from a forum a different setting:
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\DeclareRobustCommand{\textcyr}[1]{\foreignlanguage{russian}{#1}}

The latter works fine too, as long as I run pdflatex from my command
line as user root.
However I need to create and compile a .tex file from within a php
script, and then compilation partly fails, cyrillic characters are not
rendered. 
I understand that that is because the apache user launches the process:

apache  /usr/local/texlive/2010/bin/i386-linux/pdflatex --interaction
batchmode  myfile.tex

I am a newbie about this kind of issues, so my second question is: how do I fix that user issue?


Thanks a lot
regards
mario