Hi,

Some of my customers are reporting problems with unavailable
databases. Examining my application's logs reveals that
gifix -online is failing.

I take the db offline before doing anything "risky" like
altering the db schema, like this:

gfix -shut -force 300 localhost:C:\firebirddb\mydb.fdb -user sysdba

I bring the db online like this:

gfix -online localhost:C:\firebirddb\mydb.fdb -user sysdba

Unfortunately, sometimes gfix -online results in this error:
"unavailable database"
and of course, any further database accesses by users
with lower permissions levels fail.

Can anyone tell me what would cause gfix -online to fail,
or how to prevent it? Our installation is pretty plain
vanilla (see below).

Any ideas about how to recover from this failure? My only
idea so far is to run gfix -online again.

All database operations are done from C++ or Java programs.
Any operation that requires human intervention is expensive
for us (and our customers) and may endanger my job. :-)


We have customers running on linux and flavors of windows.
Our version of firebird is 1.5.3.
We connect to the firebird service via a TCP/IP connection.
firebird.conf is unchanged from the default version.

Connections are only made on localhost - different processes
on the same server read and write, but no other servers connect.

Thanks