John,

Sorry I am not clear enough. Your help is very much appreciated so
I''ll try to clarify

1- FB, Sybase etc.... all run off my laptop: it is my mobile office!

2- I am working at several customer places (I have several projects on
the go). Every time I go to a customer place, I need to reconfigure my
network conf to suit the current site's need (fixed IP, dhcp etc...) I
also work from my hotel room (no network there)

3- I am running FB superserver. so it is fbserver running as a daemon

4- I have disabled my firewall completely

5- I am convinced this is a network configuration issue. Reason I am
saying this is because I am, as we speak, working at a customer place,
configured via DHCP, I have just reeinstallled FB afresh. and it works.

6- what WILL happen tonight when I go back to my hotel: because I will
not have access to a dhcp server, I will have to reconfigure my
network interface with a fixed IP address, I will reboot my laptop and
FB will NOT start (it has not started for more than 10 days in that
scenario)

7- I have been doing exaclty that for several years now without any
problem whatsoever. Clearly it is not FB's fault. but I need to
identify why fb won't start. I am starting the service manually doing
"service firebird start" in a terminal where I am logged in as root,
the service will tell me that FB has started but this is wrong, doing
a service firebird status will soh it stopped and the firbird.log will
have the "permission denied" on a blank database.

8- only thing I have'nt tried, yet, is to run fb as root instead of
firebird to see if that makes any difference whatsoever.

9- Somehow I have a feeling that it is name-resolution related but I
do not see exactly why or how. hence my question at the network level,
what does FB do when it tries to start.


Didier
8- what I need to identify is

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, John vd Waeter <john@j...> wrote:
>
> Hi Didier,
>
> > My issue is not that I cannot connect to FB, it is that FB won't even
> > start. If fb was running and I was unable to connect to it then, I
> > would tend to agree with you BUT how comes:
> >
> > - fb seems to be the only application affected (Ie I also have Sybase
> > ASE 12.5, VMWare to run W2k and delphi, I browse the Internet and
> > read my emails still fb won't start)
> > - that reinstalling FB makes it work ? (at least for a while).
>
> Hmmm, maybe I don't understand. Is the FB-server on your laptop? Or is
> it on a server in the network? Sybase etc is on that server as well? Or
> on your laptop?
>
> If FB is on a server, could it be the server has a firewall, something
> like iptables with a strong check on the originators ipnr?
>
> > so I would love to know:
> > 1- what FB uses at startup time which is network-related
>
> AFAIK: nothing. It just sits there, listening on port 3050 (or whatever
> you configured) for connections. That is, if it can get to that
port. OR
> it is asleep until woken up by xinetd that says hey, wake up,
someone 's
> knocking on your port 3050. If on a linux-server, could it be that
after
> installation FB itself listens to 3050 and after restart it doesn't,
> waiting waiting for xinetd and that xinetd is not configured to start
> FB? Don't know exactly how to check, must be a simple linux command.
>
> > 2- what the following extra of firebird.log actually means
> >
> > >Quaddra (Server) Sun Jan 15 11:07:02 2006
> > > > Database:
> > > > operating system directive open failed
> > > > Permission denied
>
> Dunno exactly, but it might be FB doesn't have privileges to do the
> things it must do. If you install FB en run it, it runs under your
> privileges. If it starts as a daemon, it has its own set of privileges.
>
> What happens if you manually, as root, start the FB server and then try
> to connect?
>
>
> John'
>