At 12:35 AM 15/03/2006, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have a Delphi service and a Delphi application connecting to a
>firebird database located on the same machine.
>
>When running with Windows firewall or without firewall, there is no
>problems, but I run with Norton firewall, it will ask me the first
>time I start up my (normal)application and my service if I want to
>allow this. If I click "always", my application will work fine, but
>the service won't connect to my firebird database.
>
>I do the connection with: localhost:c:\data\database.gdb
>
>As I mentioned it will work fine without Norton running, and I have
>tried everything within Norton (that I can think of) to disable the
>blocking of my service connection to Firebird.
>
>The service runs as system (no interaction with desktop)
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions to how to be able to run my service
>with Norton firewall running also?

Oooooh, yes. What fun we do have with Norton.

But what you need to do is go into the admin console, go to the
Workgroup Networking tab and bring Trusted Hosts to the front.

Click the Add button and on the next dialog, select "using a range",
OK. In the next box, type in the IP address range that is allowed to
access the server, e.g. if your LAN addresses (including the routers)
are between 12.0.0.1 and 12.13.14.99, then that's your range. You
can add in other subnets as needed.

If you are using named pipes, it is yuckier because Norton REALLY
doesn't trust Windows! You'll have to go to the Advanced tab and
configure the firewall in umpteen different bits and pieces (though
different versions of Norton seem to apply different default
rules). The first ones to head for are any with NetBIOS in their
names. I won't go into detail because you can read it all up in the
help text or the manual. Once you get the hang of one rule, it will
be easy to adjust any others that are causing problems.

Also make sure that the Firebird Server is in the list of configured
programs.

Oh, and don't be astonished if, once in a while, a LiveUpdate stuffs
up your rules (as yesterday's did, on NS 2004 and 2005). It can be a
PITA finding which rule they have overridden, but it's generally a
Band-aid response to a new version of Windows Underware that has hit
and Symantec are still working on a detector for it. Start at the
top of the firewall rules list - if you find one that has the same
name as one further down the list, then that's probably the one
that's blocking your network clients.

./heLen