Cisco PIX Citrix Mix Nixes Oracle

(Apologies if you get this twice...news server troubles at ISP.)

I'm not well acquainted with firewall terminology and related technical issues and apologize for any lack of detail or extraneous detail below. But I hope there's enough information to give someone else a clue and help me out of a jam.

For a valued customer of mine in whose good graces I would like to remain, I wrote an Oracle application using VB5 as the front-end; native connectivity provided by Oracle's Objects for OLE; it runs over over SQL*Net with TCP/IP. Oracle is running on NT Server. We put the VB front-end on Citrix some months ago and everything has been working smoothly. Until yesterday. The company installed a CISCO firewall --they're referring to it as a PIX box-- and now Oracle _appears_ to be malfunctioning in a very bad way, but I suspect it's the firewall setup, as neither my app nor Oracle have been changed in any way and the problem wasn't happening before now.

Whenever my VB5 app logs on to Oracle, that user logon is being replicated a dozen or more times! For each user of my application, it looks as though there are about 12. The redundant Oracle logons seem to be occuring about one per second. I can't say exactly how many redundant logons would be generated because Oracle reaches its max processes limit and stops. (BTW, I've tried to kill the sessions -- ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION 'sid,serial#' -- but they don't go away...though I did see a posting on c.d.o.s which suggested that PMON might take as long as a day to clear a killed process. Their status in V$session is KILLED.)

The network technicians said they set up the CISCO box so that Citrix traffic is routed to port 1494, and that a range of additional ports "beneath" 1494 was also allocated for Citrix traffic. They say that UDP and TCP protocols are enabled. I'm wondering if somehow they have set the CISCO box up so that it is _ broadcasting _ incoming Citrix traffic onto that range of ports, so that Oracle is being hit with not one but with many simultaneous logon requests from a single instance of my application. Is such a thing possible?

Thanks in advance for your insights and suggestions on how I might get to the bottom of what is happening here. Tim Received on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT