> > Is it possible to make a remote connection (WAN) over TCP-IP if

you only

> > have an IP-address. I can make a connection to that server with

Windows

> > Remote Desktop, just by entering an ip-addres (and of course

account and

> > password) and manage that server, but that server is not known by an
> > DNS. Does that work with firebird 1.5?
> >

It depends what you mean by WAN.

If you mean that the client has a typical ADSL connection from which
they can RDP to your server, that is a different kettle of fish to a VPN.

RDP uses port 3389 to communicate. That means that someone has used
port forwarding to forward this port from your router to your terminal
server or terminal server gateway.

Firebird uses port 3050 to communicate. (Events use a different port,
but everything else is done on 3050). If you were to forward 3050 to
your database server, then it would work.

However this is a recipe for an insecure database. Any security flaw
found in Firebird will potentially compromise your server. Secondly,
you will notice that over-the-wire protocol is not very bandwidth
friendly. Thirdly, you will notice that over-the-wire does not encrypt
the data.

The way most people resolve this is one of the following:
* Move the processing onto the server side (eg Web based / Terminal
Services / Citrix)
* Change the architecture to replicate data to the client so slow and
unreliable connections are less of a problem.
* Use a secure tunnel or VPN which compresses and encrypts the traffic
between the client and server (eg Zebedee).

Or some combination of the above three points.

Adam