Hi Rocky,

> Has anyone here tried installing FB 1.5 and FB 2.0 on one machine?

Yes, I did and it works.

> Any tips on how to tame these 2 beasts and make them live
> harmoniously in one box?

There are two general ways to do it (as you didn't mention your target
OS, I'm talking about Windows):

- Run one version as a service and the other as an application
- Run both as an application.

Running Firebird as an Application
----------------------------------
You can start the SuperServer with
fbserver.exe -a

You can also provide the TCP port that this instance shall listen on:
fbserver.exe -a -p 3051

(Without -p the server will listen on the port defined in
firebird.conf, so must configure them differently).

Now you can zip out both servers to different directories and run them
both, configuring them to listen on different ports.

Running Firebird as a Service
-----------------------------
Only one of the servers can run as a service because the service names
are the same for both versions. You can use instsvc.exe only for one
of the two and use the above fbserver -a for the other.

Client Connection
-----------------
You must include the port number into your connection string:
So instead of dbserver:D:\DB\MyDB.fdb
you now use dbserver/3051:D:\DB\MyDB.fdb

fbclient.dll
------------
Your client will search for an fbclient.dll for connecting to the
server.

If it's a "good" client it will go to the registry and look up
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Firebird Project\Firebird Server\Instances
for the Firebird path. You can use the Firebird 2.0 client library for
both versions so you could use instreg with Firebird 2.0.

If you don't use instreg there will be no registry entry so will have
to copy the fbclient.dll to the application or Windows directory.

HTH


Best Regards

Stefan


--
Stefan Heymann
www.destructor.de/firebird