Oracle connectivity on Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2)

I work on a site that currently runs Oracle7 server release 7.3.2 for Windows NT. All of the PC clients on this site are Windows 95 workstations, with a significant percentage using OEM service release 2 (version 4.00.950B). According to Oracle technical support this particular release of Windows 95 is not supported and they have experienced some problems with it.

I am currently testing an upgrade of the Oracle server software to release 7.3.4 to fix a bug in 7.3.2. I am experiencing some really strange connectivity problems which Oracle tech. support refuses to ackknowledge since they only appear to occur on the unsupported version of Windows 95. First off, I should say that all of these workstations have 32-bit SQL*Net 2.3.2.1.6A and they will connect to the 7.3.2 databases without incident. A significant portion of these PC's with OSR2 will not connect to any of the new 7.3.4 testing databases. It appears as though they cannot find the listener. What is really weird is that some Win95 OSR2 PC's will connect to 7.3.4, and the 16-bit SQL*Net 2.1.4 which is also installed on these PC's will always connect to 7.3.4.

I have traced the SQL*Net activity on the client PC's and have found that, so far at least, the machines that fail are trying to use socket 16 and they get an o/s error 511 and 61 (I have been unable to ascertain what these errors are). On any of the PC's that connect properly, socket 16 is never used. I'm not sure if this is significant but it certainly is suspicious. I have also upgraded the version of the SQL*Net on the client to 2.3.4 but without success.

Has anyone out there experienced similar problems? I would really appreciate any help you might be able to provide on this most perplexing problem.

Rob Richardson
DBA
HRH Consulting Inc. Received on Thu Dec 17 1998 - 09:08:53 CST