sqlnet v2 netware client problems / no login / delay ora-12536 PARTIAL SOLUTION

Hi. I posted a query a while ago, but I think it was in the .servers group (since posting in *this* group for weird reasons was forbidden at the time).

  Back then, I told about trouble connecting to an Oracle Database running on a netware server, from win95 clients running SQL-net2-spx. At the same time, we had no problems with sqlnet v1.

  A nice guy responded, and suggested it might be because we were running both v1 and v2 listener on the same server, which is supposed to work but often causes problems.

  Unfortunately, we already "tried" that. We had one server running both v1 and v2, which it seemed it was impossible to log into using v2. We also had several running v1 listener, and they worked fine. And finally, we had a server running only v2 listener - this worked "some times, for some people, some of the time".   The problems varied from "could not connect at all", to "could connect sometimes" (with long delay - around 90 seconds, varying), to "crashed when trying to connect", and then a few could connect instantly. And a lot of "ora-12536 - operation would block".

  We've experimented with various versions of the netware client (Novell NW client 32 for win95 v2.11 etc), which modified the symptoms of the problems somewhat, but didn't really seem to help.

  Then today we instead tried to hook up a TCP/IP listener. The funny thing is, this works! But even then, there is a strange "feature" - the connection takes 20 seconds to be established.

  We are going to accept this, since we are in business to produce something with our hardware and software, not fiddle with oracle middleware. But it is a bit irritating, since up til now (the past couple of years) we have used SQL Net V1 with very few problems. And with a connection time of less than 1 sec. Aargh.

I wonder, if this is a secret plot from MicroSoft, to harm the reputation of Novell Netware ? Since TCP/IP works for us, and SQLSPX / SQLNet v2 with SPX has caused us endless sorrow, the net effect will be, that we start shifting away from Novell products and towards Microsoft products (on a windows NT network, we won't have much use for ipx/spx).

  During the last 2 years transmission towards win95, we have had a lot of fighting with that Netware client stuff, and it seems that either novells or microsofts support for the stuff has been halfhearted. They (novell at least) probably don't think so, but that is the way it feels for us (and we decide where to spend/waste our money).   It grieves me a bit, since I like Novell better than microsoft for no apparent reason, but struggling with these problems just isn't fun.

I wish I could get an explanation in a few years, telling me what really was wrong. We've stripped computers clean of software, installed vanilla win95 versions, then vanilla Netware clients, then vanilla SQLNet V2 out of the box on them, only to encounter the same GPF's, and weird Oracle error codes only found in hardware/platform-specific manuals. And varying the versions of netware client(not so many choices) and oracle SQLNet(lots of versions

• how many combinations of 1.2.3.4.1.1. can you come up with ?)

PS: The funny thing is, I mostly want to blame Novell and Microsoft, not Oracle. This is strange, since it might as well be their fault. But changing from novell to ms and such doesn't require us to rewrite our code, while changing database would (and is thus not an option. Too much of our code is dependant on triggers and pl/sql).

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Goddag mit navn er Gert Bo og jeg er en potens af 2.