On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Myles Wakeham <myles@...> wrote:

We recently moved a virtual server with a Firebird 1.5 database server (Linux x64 Super Server) from one host to another.  We have seen this in the past, although rare (maybe once a month) and a server service restart fixes it.

But now we are seeing it daily.  This is from the firebird.log file:

firebird.edgeneering.com (Server)       Tue Oct  8 07:35:43 2013
        Database:
        I/O error for file "/srv/db/redge.fdb"
        Error while trying to write to file
        Bad file descriptor

Does anyone know what the root cause of this is?  Is it a filesystem error?  I believe the file system is ext3 or ext4.  I'd have to double check, but is there anything we can do to give Firebird better access to the disk to avoid this sort of thing?

"Bad file descriptor" is an OS error.  My first thought is that the virtual server somehow thinks the device is read-only and Firebird is (quite reasonably) asking for write access.  Or the OS may think that write-sharing is a bad idea.  File descriptors are pretty basic things and Firebird always asks for the same access - except for read-only databases, so the fact that this comes and goes is odd.

Good luck,

Ann