At 04:57 AM 11/12/2008, you wrote:

>What I'm using:
>firebird 2.1.1 (superserver), downloaded from apple's downloads (says it's from
>IBphoenix)
>MacOS X 10.5.5, on an Intel Core 2 Duo (2GHz) Mac Mini, with 3GB RAM.
>
>Demo of problem:
>...English.lproj/var/help> qli -u SYSDBA -p xxxxxxxxx
>Welcome to QLI
>Query Language Interpreter
>QLI> help
>** QLI error from database **
>Your user name and password are not defined. Ask your database administrator to set up
>a Firebird login.
>
>QLI> ready help.fdb
>QLI> show relations
>Database "help.fdb" readied as QLI_0
> TOPICS
>
>
>The firebird account was created as part of installation, and I've stopped/restarted
>(correctly) the database server processes since then. I can obviously access the
>help database if I do so explicitly, but not implicitly with the qli help command, nor
>without the -u and -p arguments. This is the first time I've tried firebird on the Mac,
>or indeed a recent version at all, but I don't recall anything like this sort of trouble
>with it on e.g. Solaris.

qli is not a firebird-supported application. It's there for old stagers and experimenters, who can dabble with GDML at will, with no guarantees.

It's well possible that gli won't connect to superserver on a POSIX platform. There *was* no superserver in gli's time: its advent is a creation of the Firebird project and, by nature, it does not do the "direct connect" that is possible with the MacOSX equivalent of the embedded client library, libfbembed.so.

So, if you're intensely serious about using gli, the obvious Next Thing would be to grab libfbembed.so and experiment with that. You may need to extract it from the Classic kit; it is likely that it is not distributed with SS.

>I do have an old "interbas" account still kicking around, being picked up by the Mac via NIS from my Sun server/workstation, but the UID is different, and I'd hope that isn't interfering with anything. I have my own Mac port of "getent", and although the firebird account was created locally, it's properly visible on the Mac; for example, I can su to firebird just fine.

If you're not logged in as 'interbas' it should be irrelevant.

>What am I doing wrong, or what's broke? What's the point of the firebird account anyway (remember, it's been many years since I've used firebird or interbase)?

In reality, anything could be broken - gli has never been a maintained component of Firebird. But no application can make a local connection to databases on SS. From Firebird 2 onwards, the methods for connecting to Firebird servers have been hardened - which one could suspect is behind your authentication problems on SS.

I don't *know* of any switch you can use to invoke the internal code that reads from the qli help database. But the right place to ask about this, if you're really keen, is firebird-devel. Some of the core developers and kit builders do use gli and might be able to suggest something.

>What's the point of the firebird account anyway (remember, it's been many years since I've used firebird or interbase)?

Firebird isn't InterBase. All of IB's stuff was owned by root. Over the years, much has been done to harden Firebird. All of Firebird's stuff is owned by firebird. You shouldn't be attempting to log in as firebird. The main concern is to ensure that the firebird user is in a group that has rwx rights to directories where databases live, along with rw group access to the database file itself.

The usual way to effect this is to create a firebird group (if the install script didn't already create it) and include any OS users that need direct access to database files. On SS, this won't normally be an issue; with libfbembed.so, it is an issue, because the embedded client connects directly to databases. For your attempts with SS to use an application that is hard-wired to do an embedded/direct connect, there might be permissions issues in addition to the protocol one...

If you have a real need to use gli....take it to firebird-devel to get it sorted as to what your options are. The people who do the Mac builds are also there, so that's where you will get the insights about your particular setup.

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Note to Ann -- if you have some input to contribute to this, would you mind waiting until it appears in firebird-devel? We really do need to be quite firm about keeping firebird-support for postings about released versions of Firebird.

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^ heLen