Hi Bill,

It is possible, and is relatively easy to do.

Firebird listens to port 3050 by default. If your router / firewall
forwards 3050 to the database server, then it will work just as if it
is on the same LAN.

The big gotchas are:

1) The connection speed is a lot slower than the slowest LAN you ever
used even for broadband, so if your application needs to read / write
a lot of data, then perhaps a terminal services model would be better
suited.

2) Firebird doesn't encrypt or compress the data it sends. Your
firewall may be able to only forward the port from a particular vpn.

3) If you are using events, they go on a different port, and you will
need to define this in one of the conf files.

You really need to have some data rate measurements over the LAN
first though. If your program reads 2 MB of data when the form opens,
do not expect to see any response from the program for 10 seconds on
broadband. If you are sharing the connection with other applications,
remember a large email is enough to bring your system to its knees
for a few minutes.

You could use a service that sits on the database server as a wrapper
around your database calls, written in REMObjects or equivalent. Or
there is another program (Zebedee?? I think) that can take care of
point 2 for you.

Otherwise, terminal services is definately a viable solution, as the
data itself is never shipped offsite, just screenshots etc.

Adam



--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "bill_zwirs" <bzwirs@z...>
wrote:

>
> Firebird 1.5.2
> Windows32 platform
> Delphi5 application
>
> I have a customer who has opened another office in another suburb
> and would like to be able to access the database accross the
> internet from the new site.
>
> Is this possible and (if so) where do I find information on how to
> set this up?. The application currently works fine at his old site
> on a small local network consisting of a server and five
> workstations. I'm not a networking/coms person so please reply in
> simple english.
>
> thanks in advance
>
> Bill