Firebird on Fedora 17

Created by: Lester Caine, Last modification: 11 Oct 2012 (19:57 BST)

The Fedora repo has the latest builds of Firebird, but is still a little behind on Flamerobin. I still prefer to use the classic engine which while it installs happily, it can not be run until xinetd is installed and started. I am missing something here as gpk-application is not nearly as flexible as the search facilities are not nearly as good as those provide in the SUSE yast software manager. yast also provides a runtime services management panel for which I need to establish the replacement, but a quick

service xinetd start

will start it up, and a quick check via flamerobin that the server is running can be made by accessing the server version. The default password is 'masterke' rather than the randomly generated one that some linux installations create.

The configuration and alias files for firebird on this installation are in the /etc/firebird folder which is nice and the code is located in /usr/lib64/firebird and temporary files are located in /tmp/firebird.

The cron backup package is not provided so needs to be copied from previous installations. This is one of the main reasons for continuing to use Firebird in preference to MySQL or Postgres. The backup process can be run while sites are active, and so an automated process maintains the last 5 backups in a storage area for each website, which are then mirrored to an alternate machine via rsync.