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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.

Pinging the server

The ping command — available on most systems — is a quick and easy way to see if you can connect to a server machine via the network.For example, if your server’s IP address in the domain that is visible to your client is 192.13.14.1, go to a command shell on the client machine and type the command

ping 192.13.14.1

substituting this example IP address with the IP address that your server is broadcasting.If you are on a managed network, and you don’t know the server’s IP address, ask your system administrator.Of course, you can also ping the server by its name, if you know it:

ping vercingetorix

If you are connecting to the server from a local client — that is, a client running on the same machine as the server — you can ping the virtual TCP/IP loopback:

ping localhost

or

ping 127.0.0.1

If you have a simple network of two machines linked by a crossover cable, you can set up your server with any IP address you like except 127.0.0.1 (which is reserved for a local loopback) and, of course, the IP address which you are using for your client machine.If you know the “native” IP addresses of your network cards, and they are different, you can simply use those.

Once you have verified that the server machine is reachable from the client, you can go on to the next step.

Making sure that the Firebird server is running

Most — but not all — installation packages start up the Firebird server as one of the final steps during installation, and also make sure that Firebird is started at every reboot.

After being launched, the Firebird server should be running:

On Linux or other Unix-like systems

As a service.

On Windows server systems

As a service or as an application.Service is default and highly recommended.

The following sections show you how to test the server on each platform.

Server check: Linux and other Unices

Use the top command in a command shell to inspect the running processes interactively.If a Firebird 5 server is running, you should see a process named firebird and possibly also fbguard (the Guardian process).

The following screen shows the output of top, restricted by grep to show only lines containing the string firebird:

paul@fili ~ $ top -b -n1 | grep [f]irebird
 7169 firebird  20   0   29668    992    560 S   0,0  0,0   0:00.00 fbguard
 7171 firebird  20   0  228160   5876   3048 S   0,0  0,1   0:00.01 firebird

As an alternative to top, you can use ps -ax or ps -aux and pipe the output to grep.

The process name is firebird regardless if Firebird is running in Superserver, Classic or SuperClassic mode.However, it is possible to configure a Classic-mode Firebird in such a way that it runs as a service under (x)inetd.In that case, you will only see a firebird process if a client connection has been made.

Another way of testing the server after installation is by starting a Firebird client (e.g. /opt/firebird/bin/isql) and connecting to a database or creating one.These operations are described later in this guide.

If it turns out that the server hasn’t been started after all, you may need to do this manually, e.g.with /etc/init.d/firebird start or systemctl start firebird and systemctl enable firebird, depending on the type of Linux system and your Firebird installation package.