At 10:04 AM 28/12/2009, you wrote:

>I am an IT support person that has a firebird database on my server supporting an end program.

A database doesn't work on its own. You need to have the Firebird server running. The client application program tries to connect to the Firebird server, telling it the details of the database it wants to access.

>I am having an error that says something about losing IP connection to the localhost.

This is far too vague. The Firebird client library (that lives with the client application) delivers error messages, including those from the network, back to the client app and the client app handles them. If the word "localhost" appears in the message that your app has processed and delivered to the client's screen, it suggests a remote connection is being attempted to the local loopback server. That will never work.

>The problem is that the error keeps popping up until the server runs out of memory and freezes.

Whatever the client app is doing, it is doing it over and over, and not cleaning up after each occurrence. If the *server* is running out of memory, maybe you are running Classic and each connection attempt is succeeding to some degree.

Check your Services applet: find out whether Firebird is running and whether the executable is fbserver.exe (Superserver) or fb_inet_server.exe (Classic).

>I turn the server off and back on for it to work again.

Sure, that will work. But all you really need to do is stop whoever it is from trying to run that application until you have the interface sorted out. At worst, you only have to go in and stop the Firebird service.

> Is there any type of error capture that can have to message up once on the screen after connection is restored

Can't figure out what you mean here...

> (the NIC loses connection for maybe ½ second, if that long)?

If the application *is* written to connect to localhost then it's not using the NIC. Localhost is the TCP/IP local loopback server. It will work ONLY for a client located on the same physical machine. If you are running Vista, the local loopback server won't be available, even to a local client: you'll need to use the network node name of the server even though the client application is not physically remote from the server.

For immediate purposes you do need to ask the software vendor what you can do with the application to stop it going into an endless retry loop when it fails to connect for whatever reason. There's not a lot Firebird can do with a misbehaving client application...on the other side of the coin, there's not a lot a client application can do if the Fb server process isn't running or it is denied access to it.

./heLen