Broken pipes with a "failed to start a dedicated server process"

Running tg4ifmx (transparent gateway for Informix) on a Sun box. I have checked, double-checked and triple checked the initsid.ora file, the listener.ora file, the .odbc.ini file... can not see any errors.

The problem: the infamous ORA-12500 error.

The sequence of events that I think is happening.

The listener receives a SQL*Net connection for the gateway sid.

The listener fires up the gateway shell script. This shell script in turns set some environment variables before EXEC'ing the Oracle gateway software.

The EXEC shell command does not spawn a new process. The software that is EXEC'ed, is executed in the current process space.. the pid thus remains the same.

Set trace level to 16 in the listener. What seems to be happening is that the listener successfully launch the shell script. The shell script execs the gateway software. The listener now attempts to talk to the gateway software using IPC. Unix error 32 occurs. "Can not read from a broken pipe".

The listener returns an ORA-12500.

I thought maybe the shell is to blame. The EXEC command seems to be handled slightly differently between the KSH, SH and CSH. I always use ksh (he sez hanging his shell flag ;-).. Anyway, same problem when using the standard /bin/sh.

Note that the shell script is executed. Thus no problems with file permissions or paths or stuff like that. The STDOUT and STDERR of the Oracle gateway software is nothing - nada. I'm redirecting the output to files and these come up empty. No clues there.. (ok, assuming that the fact that there are no STDOUT & STDERR output is not a clue in itself Mr Holmes.. :-)

Any comments, ideas, suggestions?

Thanks.

regards,
Billy

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Earth first! We'll stripmine the other planets later.