Lester Caine wrote:

> Having been forced to put XP into a couple of sites this week

I feel sorry for you...

>, I was not
> surprised to find problems with them talking to the network

Me neither.

> This points out the need to check network set-up via 'ping' BOTH WAYS
> before even trying to set up TCP/IP services like Firebird ;)

Well, not really. Ping has got nothing to do with it. I have many machines
that work perfectly, and you can't ping them. Ping is just ICMP traffic,
Firebird is TCP. An easy way to check is simple: telnet host 3050, and see
what happens.

> And if in doubt - remove the Firewall :)

Unfortunately, WinXP has firewall for a reason. Many reasons that is. I also
find removing those the easiest (and sometimes the only) way to solve such
problems - short of installing some other OS. Most of these fw software are
buggy enough, and I haven't found one that doesn't make your network
connection crawl, but still it seems like a necessity. ADSL routers are great,
but they only protect from direct frontal attack. And there are many other
ways... Well, this going OT, so I'll stop here.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net