Firebird Database Server 2.0.4

** IMPORTANT **

The ODS has changed since Firebird 1.5. See the notes below regarding the new ODS and installation over older versions of Firebird.

This document is a guide to installing this package of Firebird 2.0.4 on the Win32 platform. These notes refer to the installation package itself, rather than Firebird 2.0.4 in general.

Before installation
New ODS 11.0
Installation on systems with Firebird 1.5
Installing on systems with Firebird 2.0
New features of the installer
Known installation problems
Uninstallation
Other notes
Installation from a batch file

Before installation

It is recommended that you UNINSTALL all previous versions of Firebird or InterBase before installing this package. It is especially important to verify that fbclient.dll and gds32.dll are removed from <system32>.

New ODS 11.0

Firebird 2.0 features a new ODS 11.0 which is wholly incompatible with the ODS 11.0 used by the previous alpha releases.

If you are installing this release of Firebird 2.0 for the first time over a previously installed Firebird 2 alpha it is recommended that you install into a fresh directory. This is because an uninstall will preserve the existing security2 database. However this older version uses an incompatible ODS so you will be unable to connect to the server.

Installation on systems with Firebird 1.5

The security database has been changed. The new database is called security2.fdb and uses a strengthened password encryption algorithm. You can find out more info about the new security features in the release notes.

The new database structure and the changed encryption presents several migration problems for sites that have many user ids. The installer makes no attempt to carry out this migration. This must be done manually. A possible migration technique is available in misc/upgrade/security/.

Installing on systems with Firebird 2.0

In addition to the ODS change please note that the installer cannot automatically detect if a Firebird 2.0 Alpha or Beta server is running as a service. Therefore you will receive no warning until the installer attempts to overwrite an active file. This can be avoided if you uninstall first.

New features of the installer

If an existing firebird.conf is detected the installer will install the default conf file as: firebird.conf.default. The existing firebird.conf file will be untouched. This is to ensure that access restrictions are maintained after an upgrade.
Support for several languages has been added to the installer. This support extends ONLY to the installation process.

NOTE: The available languages are determined by the localized version of Windows that you are running. This means, for example, that Western European users will not normally see the slavic languages available.

Known installation problems

None are known at this time.

Uninstallation

It is preferred that this package be uninstalled correctly using the uninstallation application supplied. This can be called from the Control Panel. Alternatively it can be uninstalled by running unins000.exe directly from the installation directory.
If Firebird is running as an application (instead of as a service) it is recommended that you manually stop the server before running the uninstaller. This is because the uninstaller cannot stop a running application. If a server is running during the uninstall the uninstall will complete with errors. You will have to delete the remnants by hand.
Uninstallation leaves four files in the install directory:
- aliases.conf
- firebird.conf
- firebird.log
- security2.fdb

This is intentional. These files are all potentially modifiable by users and may be required if Firebird is re-installed in the future. They can be deleted if no longer required.

Other Notes

Firebird requires WinSock2. All Win32 platforms should have this, except for Win95. A test for the Winsock2 library is made during install. If it is not found the install will fail. You can visit this link:

https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q177719

to find out how to go about upgrading.