Customising Your Installation

Running Firebird as a service with a special user name
Installing Multiple Servers
Supporting legacy applications and drivers

A number of tools and tricks are available for certain kinds of customisation you might want to make in your installation. Separate documentation is provided for most of these tools, in the form of text files in your installation's \doc\ folder.

Note also that most of these tools have skeleton help available simply by running the executable concerned -help or -? arguments. It doesn't matter which you use: both are invalid, prompting the executable to display all its valid ones.

Running Firebird as a service with a special user name

Firebird can be made more secure on a Windows system if it is run as a service with its own user name. If you want to make use of the secure login feature, create a “firebird service user” on the system with any name and password you like. It must have the privileges for a normal user.

More information is in the document named README.instsvc.txt. If you have a zip kit, you will find it in the /doc/ directory of the zipfile's root. If you don't have a zip kit available, the file won't be available until after the installation. You can read the same document at this URL.

Installing Multiple Servers

Firebird 2.1 makes it a little easier to run multiple servers simultaneously. However the second and subsequent servers must be installed manually. You can read more about this in the file install_windows_manually.txt available in the doc directory after installation, or it can be found at this URL.

The detailed description in Chapter 9 of the Firebird 1.5.x release notes, for configuring an alternative service port and accessing from applications, still holds for the Fb 2.x releases and is essential reading if you plan to have more than one server running.

Supporting legacy applications and drivers

Traditionally, local applications that use InterBase or Firebird have expected to load the gds32.dll client library from the system directory. Firebird 2.x versions ship with a tool named 'instclient.exe' that can install a clone of fbclient.dll to the Windows System directory. This clone gets patched on the fly so that its file version information begins with "6.3", to provide compatibility for old applications that check the GDS32.DLL file version and can not make sense of a number string such as "2.0".

InstClient.exe Tool

This 'instclient.exe' tool can also install the FBCLIENT.DLL itself in the Windows system directory, if required. This will take care of tools or applications that need to load it from there, on clients where the operating system still permits user DLLs to load from the system directory.

The instclient.exe utility should be located in the 'bin' directory of your Firebird installation and must be run from there in a command shell.

Usage of instclient.exe:

  instclient i[nstall] [ -f[orce] ] library
             q[uery] library
             r[emove] library

where library is: fbclient | gds32

'-z' can be used with any other option, prints version.

Version information and shared library counts are handled automatically. You may provide the -f[orce] option to override version checks.

Caution

If you -f[orce] the installation, it could break another Firebird or InterBase® version already installed. You might have to reboot the machine in order to finalize the copy.

For more details, see the document README.Win32LibraryInstallation.txt which is located in ..\doc.