At 12:47 PM 25/10/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>./heLen, please, let me come and worship at your feet.

Hmm, haven't made my mind up about foot-worship yet. :-)

>Using the -se localhost:service_mgr works a treat.
>
>I have a couple of questions.
>
>Why is it safe letting a cron job use a direct connection. It is
>possible, though unlikely, that the database may be in use at this
>time, and since gbak does garbage collection, isn't there a danger
>that direct file and networked write access together may corrupt the
>database?

Gbak runs in a single snapshot transaction. It never sees anything that
wasn't there when it started (including garbage).

>Since I'm using Classic I though I was using xinetd for all database
>connections (certainly external access can be disabled by swiching the
>firebird xinetd service off). Is it the case that by default gbak does
>not use xinetd in my earlier example

Yes - both of your examples, actually, since gbak can't make a
network-style connection to a database except through the service manager.

>, and does the -se
>localhost:service_mgr force xinetd usage?

Yes, since gbak in this case connects using libfbclient.so and passes its
commands to service_mgr (a kind of service-access layer that dwells in the
fb_inet_server process), not to the database file. There are two clients -
libfbembed.so and libfbclient.so. It is the libfbembed.so client (which
embeds all that server-side stuff) that gbak uses as its client for direct
access; and libfbembed.so can't make network connections.

>If you are UK based I'll buy you a drink nect time I'm in your area.

I'm not. :-) Thirsty weather here today, though, 32 deg. C by midday,
humid, with thunderstorms rumbling all about.

./heLen