Hello Group,

As an add-on to our product, we have written custom backup software
that backups up all of the databases used by our products via the
services API; compresses and encrypts these backup files, then sends
the resulting file to a secured off-site location. This process has
been working fine for over a year across all of our hosted servers and
a couple of customer owned servers.

Overnight however, one of the backup tasks on a customer's server
failed with no error messages from the Services API.

Our backup utility is written in Delphi and wraps the TIBBackupService
(IBX), but I believe I have also duplicated the issue using gbak with
the -se switch.

Server: Win2003 SP2 / 4GB / 2 x Xeon 3.2
Firebird: 1.5.3.4870 (Classic) / Service mode.
(I know this isn't the latest version of 1.5, it just hasn't been
upgraded since just after 1.5.3 was released, and it worked perfectly
on this server for several months).

The following script
---

C:\>cd\program files\firebird\firebird_1_5\bin\

C:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin>gbak -b -se
localhost:service_mgr localhost:myalias c:\test.fbk -user sysdba
-password masterke -v

C:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin>
---

The database is about 1GB in size, and this command takes just a
second to run with no output to the command line (on the server, on my
laptop it works fine). The output file is not even generated.

The Firebird service is running as SYSTEM which does have permissions
to write to that location.

Yet if I change the command to not use the Services API.

---
C:\>cd\program files\firebird\firebird_1_5\bin\

C:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin>gbak -b localhost:myalias
c:\test.fbk -user sysdba -password masterke -v

---

This works and generates the backup file (which I subsequently
restored and validated).

I have advised our technical department to restart the service (which
they claim to have, and given the fb_inet_server.exe process with the
largest CPU time has only used 20 seconds of CPU I believe them).

There seems to be no other problem with the database engine, the other
applications are working normally.

The Firebird log has a couple of 10054 (winsock errors) and at least
one "SERVER/process_packet: broken port, server exiting"

Any ideas as to what can cause backups to fail through the services
API when they work perfectly through a standard gbak call, or what I
might do to narrow down the problem?

Thanks in advance
Adam