I am a admin of the Fishbowl Inventory (FBI) system for our company, which is a Java app on top of Firebird.

I need to move the system off an unstable machine. FBI does not allow me to simply replace the .FDB files, for reasons that have not been explained (error codes that make no sense). I experimented with using the system's automated nbackups to replace the information in an existing .FDB, and that works. *phew*

The problem is that the system's Scheduler function, without any warning or errors, stopped making these nbackups last May. So I need to make an nbackup manually. So I tried...

nbackup -U gone -P fishing -B 0 ../data/EXAMPLE.FDB ../data/ex.bak

However, this results in the error, "You must be either SYSDBA or owner of the database".

The thing is, the user "gone" is the only one that appears in SHOW USER in isql, so how could it be the case that they are not the owner? Can one assign ownership to a non-existant user? Might it be assigned to SYSDBA?

Moving on I tried the same command, but this time with SYSDBA and masterkey. This results in another error, "Your user name and password are not defined." I assume this is because "masterkey" is no longer used, but the installer process does not ask for a password. The dox suggest that the password might be randomly assigned in this case, and then stored in a file, but I cannot find the file it refers to.

Can anyone offer suggestions on how to solve this?