At 08:54 AM 15/08/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>Hi Folks,
> I've just installed the firebird 1.5.2 classic rpm on Mandriva linux
>and I cannot connect via tcp using isql.
>
>My command line is /opt/firebird/bin/isql localhost:/data/db/test.fdb
>-user <username> -password <password>
>
>In the firebird log file I get
>INET/inet_error: connect errno = 111
>
>repeated twice.

That's ECONNECTIONREFUSED. That will happen when you try to make a network
connection and xinetd isn't responding to a network call. There could be a
few reasons for that but I guess the first one will be to do a ps -aux
|grep xinet and find out whether it is.

>If I connect without the localhost, ie
>
>/opt/firebird/bin/isql /data/db/test.fdb -user <username> -password
><password>
>
>it all works. I've checked the services and host file, and they seem ok.

I have the same rpm installed on Mandrake 10.1 Community and connecting via
localhost works fine. Note that when you connect via localhost, you will
connect through the xinet daemon using the libfbclient.so client, whereas
when you do the direct connect, you don't use the daemon and you use the
libfbembed.so client. I can go either way, transparently, on my setup,
which is supposed to be the same as the equivalent commercial (Mandriva)
release.

Two possibilities are
1) the hosts entry for localhost isn't correct. As I recall, some of the
distros install a localhost entry with a dummy domain called localhost. In
my hosts file, I have just plain
127.0.0.1 localhost

On the network, the machine (one of my laptops) has the hostname
"mini". Initially, when I set up networking, the Mdk installer wrote
altered the hosts entry this way:

127.0.0.1 localhost mini

That caused an inet error (can't recall which one) when I tried to connect
from a remote machine. I changed it to

127.0.0.1 localhost
10.12.13.5 mini

(That IP address being the TCP/IP address that the notebook's NIC was
configured to be in the network setup wizard).

2) Maybe there's something wrong with permissions, e.g. the database file
is owned by the user you are logged in as and the firebird user (which
kicks in when xinet starts a Classic process for a tcp user) doesn't have
permissions for the file and/or the directory it is in. Read the Linux
installation parts of the release notes for details about what you have to
do in this regard.

Sorry if this is a bit patchy, I'm trying to follow a live Sibelius concert
on the radio, with V. Ashkenazy conducting. :-)

./heLen