Networked File Systems
Go Up to Database Files
An InterBase database must reside on a disk local to the server software that accesses it. The database file (including any secondary files and shadow files) cannot reside on networked or remote file systems (called mapped drives on Windows and NFS file systems on UNIX). External tables and UDF libraries can reside on networked file systems, but this practice is not recommended because networked file systems can suffer from intermittent availability.
On UNIX, the InterBase software detects that a database file is located on an NFS file system. In this case, it invokes the remote access method to contact an InterBase server process running on the host that exported the file system. If there is no InterBase server software running on that node, any connection to the database fails.