Thanks for the reply, John.

I've added some notes below (and snipped out some stuff).

JMC

> My /etc/hosts.equiv file currently contains:
> localhost.localdomain

Have your tried adding "blacky.localdomain" to the hosts.equiv file?
Adding a plain "localhost" might help too.
JMC: I actually had tried each of these by themselves, but adding them
didn't do anything for it either.

I'm assuming this is from your /etc/hosts file:
JMC: No, these are things I've tried in the /etc/hosts.equiv file.

>
> I've tried:
> localhost
>
> 127.0.0.1 blacky localhost.localdomain localhost
> (copy of the "localhost" entry from /etc/hosts)

You shouldn't need to change your host file around unless you are not
connected to a network, is that the case?
JMC: The network setup is a bit odd. I'm on a LAN that's behind a router
that does NAT--so all the IP addresses of the machines are non-routable:
blacky is 10.0.0.6

Does "blacky" have a valid
DNS entry somewhere?
JMC: Nope.

If so you don't want blacky as 127.0.0.1 in your
hosts file. Create an additional line with blacky's real ip address,
followed by the host name blacky (and maybe blacky.localdomain).
JMC: Well, even though there's no DNS-awareness of the server's name,
I thought I'd give this a try anyway. Although it doesn't yet work,
the nature of the error message has changed substantially:

blacky.localdomain (Client) Thu Nov 1 19:01:18 2001
INET/inet_error: connect errno = 111

blacky.localdomain (Client) Thu Nov 1 19:01:18 2001
/opt/interbase/bin/ibguard: guardian starting bin/ibserver


blacky.localdomain (Server) Thu Nov 1 19:01:20 2001
SERVER/process_packet: connection rejected for root

(this last message is repeated 32 times--a retry count?)

So is it now saying that root isn't the user that's supposed to run it?
(I did set it up with an ownership of a user called firebird earlier in
the day, but reverted to root because I hoped that would eliminate one
variable.)

Just to see if I might get a different error message, I tried isql and
gsec. They both report that the user id/password isn't defined (I'm
using sysdba with the password from SYSDBA.password). Is the deamon not
running or something of the like? (It occurs to me that I haven't
actually changed the PATH to include /opt/interbase/bin (but things seem
to be running okay with a fully qualified path, so I wasn't too worried
about that).

So, closer but not quite there yet.... (I'm starting to be a tad
concerned about getting InterServer/Interclient working on it!)

Thanks much,

John