At 11:09 PM 28/11/2007, you wrote:

>I'm a bit of a newbie to firebird and have had a problem where every
>time I access the server where my firebird service is running &
>database is located my users get the following error message when
>their Delphi 7 applications try to access the database:
>
>The requested operation cannot be performed with a user-mapped section
>open.
>
>This has only happened since my colleague also accessed the server
>last week. Can anyone tell me what is likely to be causing this
>problem?

Never try to connect a Firebird client to a database on a mapped device: it is actively prevented. (You can do a NET USE command from the command shell to see what your colleague created that has stuffed it up).

A database has to be on the same physical machine as the Firebird server and the connection path has to be the location of the database file as seen by the server. Your remote clients (including the local RDP client) must connect to the network node name (or IP address, in the case of TCP/IP connection, if you prefer) and the physical path.

Grab the Quick Start Guide from the \doc\ subfolder of your Firebird installation. There you will find the legal connection path formats for the OS and network protocol you are using.

./heLen