At 08:20 PM 11/02/2005 +0100, you wrote:

> > Which model of Firebird did you install - Superserver or Classic? Check
> > the name of the executable in Firebird's bin directory - Classic is
> > fb_inet_server.exe, while SS is fbserver.exe.
> >
> > The IPServer local protocol isn't available to connect to Classic...
>
>Helen,
>
>when is there realy a need to use local protocol?
>I never got into these traps as i never do anything else than tcp/ip.

It's necessary with the current implementation of Fb Embedded. Also, some
people like it for development and ad hoc stuff because there's less
typing. I confess to doing this myself sometimes.

Other than that, I regard IPServer as just a relic from the early days of
Delphi and the BDE, when IB was distributed in a crippled form ("iblocal")
that allowed you to use IB on the local disk for development purposes only,
without any client licenses, on Windows 3.1, Win95, which didn't support
TCP/IP out of the box.

Originally, I think it was some hacker's "Windows answer" to direct local
connect on Unix. I believe the original iblocal did actually connect
directly to the database, though I wasn't around then.

Now I'll take cover and let the IPServer stalwarts flame me. I won't
answer. :-)

IPServer has been replaced in Firebird 2, with a different local protocol
that uses XNET and behaves like a more proper network protocol.

./hb