At 02:52 AM 10/09/2010, you wrote:

>The firewall is turned off at the server for the moment and I am able to
>ping it, but not able to ping fb_server. So definitely host resolution is
>not working on my side.

Host resolution has to work.

>> You don't need to (and shouldn't) if your network server is dishing out IP
>addresses via dhcp. Since you're getting error messages from the ODBC
>> client about not finding the database ("failed to locate host machine")
>this isn't about connecting to a database but about finding the host on the
>> network.
>> -- The first suspect is the static IP address you have accorded to
>fb_server node.
>
>Do you mean I shouldn't touch the hosts file if I am using DHCP? Sorry,
>didn't quite understand that.

Not necessarily...you can use the hosts file to make sure that the server node uses a static IP address...but that address won't be found if you are allowing that host to take dynamic addresses on the affected NIC. IOW, the NIC on the host server *where the firebird server is* must be certain to ALWAYS have the IP address that you associate with its hostname in the hosts file.

This "fb_server": is it the Windows network node name for that NIC? Or is it a mapping? If it's a mapping, it will never work.

>Also, the message "failed to locate host machine" is from IBExpert, is IBExpert using ODBC also?

No. Both the ODBC driver and the Delphi/ObjectPascal interface used by IBExpert implement the same Firebird API. Each interface has its own rules about things, including how (or whether) they re-interpret the error codes and message strings returned by the API...so the same error might show up with different messages in each interface. So it's a minor thing if a message thought to have come from the ODBC driver actually came from IBExpert.

The point was to say that your primary problem is finding the host machine with tcp/ip (and possibly finding the correct NIC, if you have more than one).

>The server does have a static IP, but it is perfectly pingable. I will be
>checking into the runtimes and permissions later today.

If you can ping this host named "fb_server" by name and it returns the IP address you placed for it in hosts, then the connection string as follows should work:

fb_server:d:\path_to\database

or

fb_server:aliasname

The string that Maya (I think) gave you, viz.
\\fb_server\d:\path_to\database

is not TCP/IP, so ping isn't applicable to it. It is the string for the deprecated "NetBEUI protocol" (or, more correctly, Named Pipes transport).

You could do a reality check by trying to connect remotely from isql. isql doesn't do anything "fancy" with the connection parameters and can use either of those protocols.

./heLen