As I was getting tired of all these problem reports
concerning the installation of Firebird Superserver
on RedHat 7.0, I decided to get a copy of RH 7.0 to try it myself.

I used a german evaluation copy of RH 7.0 to
check the following.

In order to install the firebird version
of IB 6.0 you will need to perform the
following steps:

1. Get the required packages:

Get the glibc update from RedHat, the one I used
was from ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/i386/glibc-2.2-5.i386.rpm

Get ncurses4 from
ftp://carrier.ision.net/pub/ftp.redhat.com/i386/en/RedHat/RPMS/ncurses4-5.0-2.i386.rpm
or another redhat mirror.

Get Firebird from
ftp://firebird.sourceforge.net/pub/firebird/release/FirebirdSS-0.9-1.i386.rpm

2. Prepare the installation:

Log in as root.
Use a plain text console to do this and be sure
that all Gnome desktops are closed.
(One user reported that the Gnome desktop
(apparently ICEwm)
blocked port 3050. I could not reproduce this
here, but it seems that it uses port numbers
that aren't assigned in /etc/services for own
purposes)

3. Add localhost.localdomain to /etc/hosts.equiv:
echo localhost.localdomain >>/etc/hosts.equiv

4. Change to the directory where you have placed
the downloaded packages.

5. Install the glibc update:
rpm --install --force glibc-2.2-5.i386.rpm

6. Install libncurses.so.4:
rpm --install --force ncurses4-5.0-2.i386.rpm

7. Install Firebird:
rpm --install --force FirebirdSS-0.9-1.i386.rpm

8. Add /opt/interbase/bin to your path:
You can either change /etc/profile
or do
export PATH=$PATH: /opt/interbase/bin
or
change the profiles in your users home directories

9. Check that all went well:

Read /opt/interbase/SYSDBA.password
to get your SYSDBA password.

gsec -display
should display the list of known users
(SYSDBA only after a fresh install)

isql /opt/interbase/examples/employee.gdb
SQL> SHOW TABLES;
should display all tables from this database
SQL>quit;

That's it.
Stir well and serve hot:-)

Frank

PS. Final hints (on xinetd.d) from John ("Orbiting" otherreality at excite dot com):

> I also had to modify my xinetd.d files to get
> interclient/interserver to work. It gets rid of the
> connection refused error in Redhat 7.0
> I added these lines (someone correct me if the
> permissions are not secure).

service interbase{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
id = interserver
user = root
server = /usr/interclient/bin/interserver
}

and Ivo dot Panacec at regionet dot cz:

> Maybe they could be better but you can start with them:

[ivop@roger xinetd.d]$ cat interbase
# default: on
# description: Interbase server
service gds_db
{
flags = REUSE
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
log_on_success += USERID
log_on_failure += USERID
server = /usr/interbase/bin/gds_inet_server
}
[ivop@roger xinetd.d]$ cat interserver
# default: on
# description: Interbase JDBC server
service interserver
{
flags = REUSE
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
log_on_success += USERID
log_on_failure += USERID
server = /usr/interclient/bin/interserver
}
[ivop@roger xinetd.d]$