Mysterious dropout - SQL*NET TCP/IP

I have a customer who is using a program I wrote that runs 7days,*24hours and hits an Oracle database every minute. Oracle is running on Novell, and we are using SQLNET TCP/IP to get to it. The app is written in VB 3.0 and is using ODBC/SQORA704.DLL.

The connection mysteriously drops out at random (hours/days apart) and is unrecoverable (loging in again won't help). I am going to get the actual ODBC error, but I think it's a send fail. I am also loading the initializer. There is no relation between the relative busyness of Oracle or the server and when the dropout occurs (the server is lightly loaded at most, most of the time it does nothing at all).

Suspciions:

0. The network.
1. The stack - Chameleon 4.0.
2. SQLNET?

Questions:

1. Why does this happen? (our customer's network is of dubious reliability).
2. Is there any way to recover from this? I am despreate enough that I am considering having the applicationrestarting Windows upon multiple consecutive failures. But this would mask the real problem and be a hack on top of a hack.
3. Really annoying: How do you get rid of the damn logon dialog box? I have silent on via registerdatabase, and log in properly, but upon the above condition I get the stupid dialog box and the program freezes. I actually had to write a stupid hack of a program that the main program spawns just before openingthedatabase that destroys this dialog box if it finds it! Twisted, but it works.

Any suggestions, even seemingly crazy, would help. Received on Sun Aug 13 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST