IBPhoenix Development

A Quick Guide to the Windows Startup Parameters for Firebird/InterBase

By Claudio Valderrama C.

The Guardian only understands -a for running it as an application. Available on NT/W2K/XP because in W9X it always runs as an application.

I think we could implement -n when starting it as an application so it will additionally run without an icon in the tray. Anyone interested? You would lose the ability to see the Guardian report on engine failures (because there's no icon to click in the tray). I think it would be more useful when GuardianOptions is set to "1" in the registry, because in this case, the guardian will keep restarting Firebird/InterBase as many times as necessary, otherwise it will close itself after the server finishes for the first time.

When the guardian starts the server, it passes to the engine the parameters -a -n if running as an application, so the engine doesn't show its own icon in the tray (you see the Guardian icon instead). This is where I got the idea of hiding the guardian's icon, too.

The engine itself supports several options:

• -a run as application
• -b run with high priority
• -d debug and run as application
• -n no icon (if run as an application, when running as service the icon is not shown)
• There are flags for TCP, named pipes and IPC but they are controlled by the license file for InterBase and are always enabled for Firebird. They are commented out for now, although it would be nice to reverse them to signal protocols that should be disabled.
• -p followed by a port name or named service (gds_db by default), to allow the the default to be changed. (Don't ask me if the client has matching functionality)
• -r run with normal priority (default)
• -z print version and exit (in practice, I see nothing printed in the console)