> Also I forgot to mention one other difference in the machines. My
> laptop has Firebird installed but not running. I have a dedicated
> Firebird server that houses the DB's I am trying to connect to. My
> development and production servers do not have Firebird installed in
> anyway. Could that be the problem? It would seem very strange if it
> was, but I am looking for anything at this point.

You might need to put the following line in /etc/services on your
production server(s):

gds_db 3050/tcp

Can you try to telnet from your production server to your database
server on port 3050? Name of the DB server must be the same as in
database URL. There's a possibility that the name you're using is
resolved to network interface with IP filter that drops the packets
from your production server but allows from your laptop. Once I had
such problem and spent quite a lot of time solving it.

Also, check if it is allowed to connect to your database server from
Tomcat JVM (check your security manager and security policy).

Best regards,
Roman Rokytskyy