Re: SQLNET V2 TCP/IP - erratic behaviour during connection

ian_at_tethys.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Ian A. MacGregor) writes:
|> gopi_t1_at_verifone.com (T.K. GOPIKRISHNA, software,BLR,01191812-269920) writes:
|> |> Hello,
|> |>
|> |> The message I get when I try to connect looks something like
|> |> "end-of-file on communication channel".
 

|> We are also experiencing random "end-of-file on communication channel"
|> errors. Ours only occur, so far, with Oracle Office. We have yet to see
|> them with any other product. In our case restarting the listener has not
|> been necessary, restarting the Office client is sufficient.

Same error but different circumstances imply that this is a different problem. Unfortunately, ORA-3113 is the generic catch all problem when a client wants to perform a network IO to the server and finds that it has rudely "hung up the phone without saying goodbye". Sort of like getting the silent treatment from an SO and being left to figure out what went wrong (not that it's ever happened to me).

In the case where the unexpected EOF happens well after a connection has been established, the problem is not with the listener since it should be clear out of the picture at this point. Either the server died unexpectedly or the network itself freaked out. If it was the server, it is generally good about leaving trace file (suicide note?) on the server if not some indication in the alert.log file.

If it's the network, debugging becomes really difficult. In one case it turned out to be a flaky router that was messing up packets of a particular length to a particular address under a particular load. That's an extreme case though.

Roderick Manalac
Oracle Corporation
rmanalac_at_oracle.com Received on Sat Sep 10 1994 - 00:59:14 CEST