At 11:47 PM 31/01/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>I have Firbird 1.5.2 installed on a Windows 2003 server running as a
>service. The service applet shows that firebird is running and the
>firebird log file doesn't show any errors. However, if I just
>type "gsec" on a command line I get:
>
>unavailable database
>unable to open database
>
>However, if I run Firebird as an application, everything works fine.
>Unfortunately, I'm using it as the back end of a web app so I can't
>count on a particular user being logged in all the time -- nor would
>I want to.

Of course not. So you need to find out why gsec's request can't find the
security database - which is what your problem reflects.

The first thing I would want to be assured about is that you don't have
another database service running, that is what your application code is
actually connecting to, e.g. fbserver.exe is running from one installation
(and the application connects to that when you run it as an application)
whereas you have a later installation (that might be Classic) that gsec is
trying to connect to, but can't, because the fbserver application process
is using the gds_db port.

If you find that fb_inet_server.exe is in the same bin dir as where you are
trying to run gsec from, then there's your problem.

You see, gsec will try to connect to the server in the bin directory where
the gsec executable is located. It doesn't need an available client
library, since it makes its own internal discourse with the API.

NB also that you have to provide the -user and -password switches to your
gsec command. You might have been able to do without them on another
machine where the ISC_USER and ISC_PASSWORD environment variables were
available (not a sensible idea on a production machine!!).

And also note that *any* local connection to Classic on Windows must be
through localhost, and the command must include the -database switch (plus
the "localhost:c:\Program Files\firebird\firebird_1_5\security.fdb". You
can omit the double quotes if there are no spaces in the path to
security.fdb...)

>I suspect that it's a permissions thing, but I have tried granting
>all kinds of permissions to the firebird install directory and I
>always get the same thing.

I doubt this is the problem, unless you have done something weird with
permissions. On Windows the service is owned by the LocalSystem user,
which has stronger powers than even Administrator.

./heLen