I tried gsec –user sysdba –pass masterke (without the quotes) and was still unable to get in, but it is not Firebird’s fault. I hope the details I provide will help others avoid this.

My friend has a small office with 5 Windows XP machines on a LAN. One machine is the “server”. The two Firebird services, Guardian and Firebird, run on this machine. The Firebird database file is located on this machine. He has a commercial software application that is basically a Windows front-end to the Firebird database.

My friend wants to write his own reports based on the Firebird data, but the company that created the application has changed the SYSDBA password, as they should, of course, but he just wants to dump his own data into Excel.

Ethical dilemma? Perhaps, but I feel that he owns his own data. Whatever – subject for another discussion.

So I agreed to help him and, being too clever for my own good, said, “what if we install Firebird on one of your work stations and MAKE A COPY of your production database to a local drive.” Heck, they even have this super-cool thing called FlameBird, which lets you export to a tab-delimited file and then import that into Excel.

First, I installed version 2.54 on the work station. Then I made a local copy of the production database. Then I tried to open the database with FlameRobin using sysdba and masterke. No dice!

Here is where I kind of lost track. I tried gsec and isql and thought I carefully followed the syntax rules (quotes for isql, no quotes for gsec). No dice. So I went home and a few hours later joined this group and posted my first question. Turns out my memory was a bit foggy and the question was wrong, hence the confusion.

Here is what I did today:

First, I figured the problem was that somehow I messed up security2.fdb by trying to open up a database file from a password-protected system with the wrong password. So I uninstalled Firebird 2.54, deleted security2.fdb (because the uninstall program does not delete it), and re-installed Firebird. Then IMMEDIATELY AFTER INSTALLING I ran gsec and logged in as sysdba/masterke. Only then did I attempt to open the database file (remember, this is a copy) and I used isql instead of FlameRobin, making sure I used the correct syntax.

Almost there…

This time, I did not get a “User name or password not defined” error, I got an error complaining about the database version.  So…

I downloaded and installed Firebird 2.1 and followed the same steps as above.

Turns out they use a 2.0 database, which opens just fine in 2.1 but not in 2.54.

And I understand it’s not a good idea to include in your documentation methods for hacking into password-protected databases, but as I said, I am new to this community and I’m sure this is something that is well-known among experienced users.