installing pear?

[JoeShmo]

FreeBSD 7.0R
Mail Toaster 5.09
seems to be receiving/sending mail ok.
when I try to use squirrelmail, I get an error:
Could not include PEAR database functions required for the database backend.
Is PEAR installed, and is the include path set correctly to find DB.php?

toaster_setup.pl -s squirrelmail  tells me:
...
\nHEY!  You need to add include_path = ".:/usr/local/share/pear" to php.ini.\n\n
... (everything else says ok)

mail3# grep -i include /usr/local/etc/php.ini | grep pear
include_path = ".:/usr/local/share/pear"

/usr/local/share/pear/ does indeed exist, and DB.php is in there, along with a total of 23 files.

what can I check next?  How can I check to see if the php subsystem is really using /usr/local/etc/php.ini, or is that file supposed to be somewhere else?