Dear group,

Last weekend i encountered a strange problem in one of my friend's
office network. I went there to install firebird on the server and a
demo application. Everything went fine except for this one workstation
at the manager's office. Seems that the application cannot connect to
the database server. Ping and telnet seems to work, and there's no
problem with the firewall, so i was confused for a while.

I poked around in the machine, and to my surprise, the machine has
firebird (windows xp, firebird 1.5.2.x, superserver) installed.
Apparently the manager installed some boxed-set software that uses
firebird. More poking around revealed that the firebird installed in
that machine has this line in the firebird.conf file:
...
RemoteServicePort = 3051
...

It was a bit strange since i thought that this setting affect how client
computers connect to this machine, not how this machine connect to other
servers....

Anyway, removing this line or setting it back to the default of 3050
"fixed" the problem, in the sense that my app could connect to the
server. Obviously the 'other' app stopped working at this point :).

Is there a way to make both programs work at the same time ?
Does this mean i need to explicitly specify port numbers in connection
strings?

Thanks in advance,
t.s.