[aww]

I owe you an apology.

Apparently open_basedir *is* working, it's just that unlike apache, the error is not being thrown to the http output?

I just noticed this in the lsws logs:

[STDERR] PHP Warning: file_get_contents() [<a href='function.file-get-contents'>function.file-get-contents</a>]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/proc/loadavg) is not within the allowed path(s): (/home/example/:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/tmp) in /home/example/public_html/phpinfo/index.php on line 5

So it's working just fine.
Just not seeing the error in the browser which threw me.
Is that a php.ini option I might be missing?