Intermedia Text Question

This has confused me for far too many nights and days. Anyone who can give help would be very appreciated.

Here's the setup: I'm running Oracle8i 8.1.5.0.2 under Linux. The database is running just fine, but I have some trouble with the updating of Intermedia Text (ConText) indices. First off, 'online' building of indices fails with an Oracle error "Feature not enabled." I assume this means that the current version just doesn't support it...

What I'm actually trying to do is to regularly update a database index for searching purposes. In order to do this, the database makes an IPC call to extproc, which then relies on the 'ctxsrv' program. The *first* time I update the index, ctxsrv gets the request and processes it correctly. If I try it again, the index is not updated. Careful inspection of ctxsrv's SQLTrace shows that subsequent attempts to update the index result in an OCI_INVALID_HANDLE error.

Now here's the good part. If I kill all running 'extproc' processes, a subsequent attempt to update the index causes ctxsrv to print an error that the RPC connection has been lost (naturally), reopen the RPC connection, and then succeed in updating the index. My current kluge for this problem is to simply 'killall -9 extproc' every time the index gets updated. If I do this, *everything works fine*. Mysterious.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? I'm suspecting a bug in Oracle's implementation of ctxsrv under Linux, but I'm not sure. Any advice would be great. Thanks!

• Bryan Quinn Note: mail sent to bquinn-spam_at_cs.nwu.edu is deliverable, but will be filtered and most likely ignored. Take care when replying.