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Use the Guardian?

The Firebird Guardian is a utility that monitors the server process and tries to restart it if it terminates abnormally.During a Windows install, you can opt to use the Guardian when running in SuperClassic or Superserver mode.However, since Windows has the facility to watch and restart services, there is no reason to use the Guardian if Firebird runs as a service (which it should).

The Guardian may be phased out in future versions of Firebird.

Installing on Linux and other Unix-like platforms

In all cases, read the Release Notes for the Firebird version you’re going to install.There may be significant variations from release to release of any POSIX operating system, especially the open source ones.Where possible, the build engineers for each Firebird version have attempted to document any known issues.

Aside from being packaged with the download kits, Release Notes for all officially released versions of Firebird can also be found at https://www.firebirdsql.org/en/release-notes/.

For Linux distributions, use the .tar.gz kit.Quite often, installation is just a matter of untarring the archive and running install.sh.In some cases, the Release Notes or packed Readmes may instruct you to edit the scripts and make some manual adjustments.

Installing multiple servers

Firebird allows the operation of multiple servers on a single machine.It can also run concurrently with Firebird 1.x or InterBase servers.Setting this up is not a beginner’s task though.If you need to run multiple servers on the same machine, the second and subsequent servers must be installed and configured manually.They need to have different service names and should listen on different TCP/IP ports.The file install_windows_manually.txt in the doc subdirectory may be of help if you’re doing this on Windows, but bear in mind that it was written for Firebird 2.1.

Also read the chapter Configuring the Port Service on Client and Server in the Firebird 1.5 (!) Release Notes:

Testing your installation

If you want to connect to your Firebird server across a network, then before testing the Firebird server itself, you may want to verify that the server machine is reachable from the client at all.At this point, it is assumed that you will use the TCP/IP network protocol for your Firebird client/server connections.