Graeme,
I do not believe it is possible with Firebird.

I too had this delima with my application - ideally one solution would
be for Firebird to allow a "path alias" instead of a direct "database
alias" in the aliases.conf file. That would give people greater
flexability for allowing programs to create databases and back them up
with date-time stamps...all whilst NOT knowing the physical location of
the database files.

Hopefully someone has the nous to do this, but until then, you may have
to do what I did and that's create a separate, self programmed server
that my clients programs connect to to find out various bits of
information, such as "where's the database path".

cheers
Mark

graeme_edwards2000 wrote:

>Does anybody know if it is possible for a client machine in a windows
>network environment to access settings from either aliases.conf or
>firebird.conf on the server programmatically?
>
>The assumption is that the firebird folder on the server is not
>available directly to the client machine.
>
>The reason I ask is because I want to simplify the process of users
>referencing databases on a remote server without losing the ability to
>backup the database from the client end.
>
>It doesn't appear that gbak is capable of referring to an alias, it
>needs the full path on the server machine and I want the client
>machine to be able to reference server databases by alias, while the
>full path name is not visible to the user, but the application will
>know it for purposes of backing up/restoring.
>
>
>
>
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