What is the best command to use to stop the firebird service?

'service firebird stop' does not seem to work (unrecognized service).

'chkconfig firebird off' works - but will this stop the service
safely?

Whatever the best command – where do I place this so if someone does
a `shutdown –r now' it will run this rather than a kill (we had a
database corruption last week due to this).

Thanks

Rod