well, I dunno about the dark africa, nor the down under australia, but
maybe you could use one of those regular internet connection via a 56K
modem (or adsl, if technology permits it in you area), and connect to
your database that way, over the net.

I did a couple of tests a few months ago, and the speed, althrough not
what it can be over LAN, is still quite acecptable. it's more or less
like having a 64Kbps frame relay, but with the expense divided by 10
or 40 (that's the price difference in Canada: 1120$ for 64kpbs frame
relay, 129$ for adsl, 25$ for 56K modem, monthly).

As long as you are not moving large amout of data per transaction,
then the speed is not that much important. With less than 6Kbyte per
transaction (which is still quite a lot of characters), then moving
will take more or less than a second.

For security, you can opt for VPN, or one package I have seen that do
encrypt/decrpyt for interbase (never used it tho, dunno if it works
with IBO)

the only drawback for that is the persistence of the connection, and
that depends on the phone company. In north america, you can be quite
assured that as long as there is some traffic (20 minutes is often the
deadline around here), the connection should last for quite a while.
As I dont know about your respective countries, I can not vouch for
that. You can add a ping component that will check for server
availability every 15 minutes as a keep alive traffic generator.

You could also use one of those dial on demand routers (like iproute -
cheap and *very* reliable) / gateway (wingate - runs on windows, what
do you expect?) and put a long timeout on your IBO connection.

naturally, you need to have a patched interbase / firebird server with
the security hole removed. A good filtering setup will also be needed
at your firewall/router, as you want to allow only a certain range of
IP (the one your remote ISP use) to go to your DB server. You can
even make a deal with the remote ISP, so he gives you a fixed IP phone
number to dial, allowing an even more tight security filtering at the
server site.

I went tru all that for a previous project, and although not that easy
to setup (lots of interconnecting components), it might become a cheap
way to have an almost permanent connection for a small price. The
setup price is a bit hefty, but the economy is in the long run, it
took 4 months to rentabilize in our case.

I hope that helps at least a bit. This list have been such a help
that I feel I need to give back a lot! :-)

Spou

--- In IBObjects@y..., lester@l... wrote:
> > However here in Darkest Africa :-) most of us(clients and me)
cannot afford
> > leased lines or permanent connections.