At 09:48 AM 2/03/2006, Ray Jenkins wrote:

>We have a customer that is running Win 2000 Server patched to Service
>Pack 4. They have been running our software for a year or so. Our
>software is using the 1.5 version of Firebird.
>
>They have wanted to upgrade to the latest version of our software and
>in the process have run into a problem.
>
>They install the software and everything looks fine. We have
>connectivity both from the server for backup's and from our client
>side connections.
>
>They then reboot the server and leave it at the login prompt. Once the
>reboot has happened we lose connectivity to our client side apps. If
>the customer logs back into the server, he still unable to connect to
>the database. In fact, he can't even run our server app's backup
>process either. The fbguard and firebird services still show that they
>are running.
>
>The customer can repeat this process, ie. when they reinstall the
>software everything works fine until they reboot the machine. But, we
>can not recreate these symptoms on our test network.
>
>The customer has a huge network, and our contacts are not their IT
>people. So it makes the task of debugging this problem difficult. We
>also only have a window every other saturday when we can get to their
>server.
>
>Since our software was running before, it seems like it must be a
>change in our application, but I have been racking my brain trying to
>think of what we could have changed in the database access, and have
>not come up with anything.
>
>My question then, is has anybody seen this kind of behaviour on a
>Windows server and do you have anything that we might try to recreate
>this on our own Windows 2000 server or that would fix it on the
>customers server.

It might not be your fault at all, given that your installations are
being done at arm's length.

First find out whether they have installed Classic instead of
Superserver, or vice versa. That could cause some problems if your
application was written for SS and used hard-coded paths. You could
try uninstalling SS on your own Win2K server, then installing
Classic, to see whether this reproduces their problems.

Find out what else they have installed on the client machines and the
server. What this sounds like to me is that they are loading the
wrong client library, possibly an old InterBase gds32.dll. There is
still commercial software around that uses IB 5.6 as its back
end. It might even be running an IB server which, of course, will be
stealing port 3050. Ask them to look in their Services display for
the word "InterBase".

./hb