> 1) How do I start the application and not have the FBServer icon show
> up in the system tray? Is there a command line parameter for
> fbserver.exe that would do this? We want it to be completely silent,
> so no system tray icon would be great.

I believe fbserver.exe -s
(Run as a service will prevent the icon showing up in the system tray)

> 2) Is there anything special we need to do to make sure our version of
> firebird.conf and the rest of the server support files is used? Does
> FBServer.exe look in the startup directory first before looking into
> the registry at the installed instance folder?

(Yes - based on the fact that we have installed our own instance of
Firebird and have not defined anything in DefaultInstance and get no
errors...)

> 3) How would we elegantly shut down the instance of FBServer that we
> created? Is there something like 'fbserver.exe -shutdown' command that
> would do this? How do we make sure it's *our* instance that we shut

down?
I would suggest registering each instance of Firebird as a seperate
service that is not started automatically with the system. (Then
start and stop the service(s) as needed)

> 4) I am assuming that the Local Protocol (XNET) is not suitable for
> this scenario, since (as far as I can see) it can't determine which
> instance to communicate with... (presumably it can only work with the
> 'DefaultInstance'). Is this a fair assumption? Could my client
> application still use the faster local protocol rather than resorting
> to a slower TCP/IP connection (albeit a local one)?

I would use a separate port for each instance of fbserver...

> 5) A bit off topic, but still relevant... is there any experience in
> this group as to how we could automatically detect an open port on the
> client at install time? We would need to find this open port for our
> instance of FBServer. We are using MS Visual C++ with VS 2005.

No. For our purposes we just "stole" an existing port number that we
figured would not be used in a business setting...

Esko Woudenberg