I am a fairly naive user of a Firebird 1.5 application which runs on
a Windows 2000 server.

Our application frequently - several times a week - stops working.
This seems to relate in some way to the Windows update procedure,
which happens in the middle of the night. We often turn up in the
morning to find our application will not start, but this rarely
happens during the day.

We get a message:
Error opening database I/O error for file "aims"
Error while trying to open file The system cannot find the file
specified.

We have the location of the file specified in the aliases.conf file.
The Firebird Control centre can see our file.
Our application is called AIMS - see http://www.lasa.org.uk/aims/
index.shtml I have talked to the vendors, who are like us, a small
charity, but they are not in a position to offer us much assistance.

We can get it to start again by stopping the Firebird service and
waiting - for an indeterminate length of time - and then it will start
again. Rebooting the server does not seem to have much effect.

We use Firebird Superserver 1.5.1 on a Windows 2000 server

As far as I can see Windows is confused about whether Firebird is
running or not. We have been running the Firebird Guardian service,
but I see that the Quick Start manual says that this is not necessary,
and when I removed Firebird and reinstalled it we lost the Guardian
applet. However now I have installed the Firebird Control Centre I
find that the Windows services and the control centre disagree about
whether Firebird is running. And the Control Centre does not seem to
be able to start the Firebird service.

Anyone able to offer me a little guidance?

Martin Rathfelder
Administration Team
South Manchester Law Centre
584 Stockport Road
M13 0RQ
0161 248 1872