At 03:37 PM 20/07/2009, you wrote:

>>you run the risk of connection refusal (Superserver)

It happens when the ultimate resolution of the filesystem path is different to the ultimate resolution of the filesystem path that was used for any existing connections. This is DELIBERATE. It protects the database from the corruption that occurs when Windows "allows" different path expressions for locations that you intend to be the *same* database. The problem is that Windows allows these but has no way to tell the server that they refer to the same file....so, while each attachment is to the same database, Firebird thinks they are attachment to different databases. Corruption of the worst kind will follow.

>Hmm, how do I trip this? Maybe I have been tripping this off.

It is possible. I can't believe the craziness of your directory names. Will your heart stop beating if you rationalise the directory naming system? I would want to do this *before* everything else, to eliminate the inevitable errors that occur when Windows messes around with fancy-nancy path names.

>Now in my testing desperation setup the aliases.conf as above and have tried to connect to them one by one. The only one I have been able to successfully connect to is alias C17_7202 today (setup on Saturday after the failures), whereas on the preceding days I was successfully able to connect any of the other 3 aliases but one by one they started to close down on me. So as of today in quick succession I can only connect to C17_7202 but cannot the other 3 alias, so we can for the moment rule out networking issues as had it been the case I would not have been able to connect to any of them.

You can rule out everything until you get real about those access paths.

>> Reserve the IP address for DEVE2 in the hosts file of the server ($windir\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) with the IP address of the host machine as it is seen by all of the clients, e.g.
>>
>> nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn DEVE2 #Host server for Firebird databases
>
>okay thanks I will work on this line. Just to know more let's say the DEVE2 and it's dynamic IP is the issue here, will I have encountered a similar resolution problem for eg. UltraVNC, because I can consistently connect to DEVE2 to perform as a VNC server.

I would hope that UltraVNC would be more reliable with loopy file names than Windows. But, even so, it still doesn't justify the alphabettimania.

>Thanks for your help. I hope I can give you more details but I am pretty lost right now not really seeing a pattern for the failures (expect the 'refusal' that you just mentioned).

I can tell you are lost. At the weekend you made another posting that made me wonder if you actually understand what "client" and "server" really mean. You were talking there about "client aliases", which is nonsense. Firebird's aliases are for *physical* file paths on the machine that hosts the Firebird server and its databases. Clients don't know about aliases.

If any of those loopy file paths of yours are for mappings (mapped drives, logical servers) then it's time to read the documentation. Firebird will *not* connect to them.

./heLen