I've encountered same problems in a production environment (here NT4,
IB5.6).
Here is what I did:

- I stopped gbak's call was running every night on same machine.
- Now I run gbak cross server on a different server (poor equipment)

- I excluded Interbase files from backup on production server. Now I backup
database files restored on a that different server.

This was stopping trouble for a while. Then I run into trouble through a
thermic problem of the raid-5-system. Sometimes the air condition was
shutting down because of power problems. System seems to run fine but
Interbase reported error (inconsistency or sth. like that). After some
testings I found that the only way was to shut down the whole system
immediately. After restarting the server there was even no need to do a
backup/restore: system and Interbas was running like a charme.

Now we are using a different system/hardware on Win2000 (since 3 months) and
we have no problem at all. Maybe my solution doesn't fit your situation but
I struggled a long time with my customer to solve this nasty problem and to
show that my software wasn't the reason for that problems...

Mit freundlichem Gruss & Best Regards

Andreas Pohl
apohl@...
www.ibp-consult.com

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Adrian Pronk" <apronk@...>
> To: <ib-support@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 10:33 PM
> Subject: [ib-support] Occasional very long-running jobs.
>
>
> > Are there practical steps that we can take to prevent these extremely
> scary
> > hanging events from occurring?
> >
> > --
> > Adrian
> >
>