protecting MySQL password on multi-user system

[Eric P <eric.maillist@gmail.com>]

I'm on a multi-user Linux system running PHP and MySQL.  I have user permissions only.  No root perms.

Whenever I do an SQL query, I include (via PHP) a file (of which I'm the owner) which exists just under the web root
which contains my MySQL username and password.

I have to keep this file's permission at 644, or else I get 'permission denied' when my PHP script tries to include it.
 Apache runs as 'noname' on this server, but I'm not able to chgrp or chown this file to 'noname'.  (Operation not
permitted)  Again, I'm only one of many (thousands of?) users on this system, so I have to implement something with
regular user perms only.

I definately don't want this file readable by 'other' (644).  Any ideas?

Thanks for reading!
Eric