Re: Problem with a combination of Windows 2K Service Pack 4, Oracle 9i, ASP and ADO.

"Phoenix_Dfire" <Phoenix_Dfire_at_Lycos.co.uk> wrote in message news:997ab78e.0308190458.66abd01f_at_posting.google.com...
> We've had a working application for the last year, which involved
> Microsoft ASP serving up web pages, which were generated from data
> retrieved from an Oracle Database via ADO.
>
> However, as part of this fix for the msblast virus, our server was
> upgraded to service pack 4 and as a result, our web pages started to
> fall over with an ASP '0x800a01fb' error when attempting to read the
> EOF flag of a recordset.
>
> At present we use Oracle's OraOLEDB.Oracle provider, which works fine
> in the VB test harness and in IIS (win2k service pack 2). We've had
> limited success with the MSDAORA OLEDB Provider, but there is a lot
> work involved, which we'd rather not have to do.
>
> Has anybody else come across this problem or has any suggestions?
>
> Specifications:
>
> Windows 2K server (Service Pack 4).
> IIS 5.
> Oracle 9i
> OraOLEDB.Oracle 9.0.1.0.1
> ADO 2.7
>
> Thanks
> C H Ford

Ouch; that's why you won't see service pack 4 on my servers. :) All that was needed for msblast, as far as I've been aware, was patch MS03-026, or #823980. It was actually released back in July... make sure your admins are keeping up with their security updates!

I'm betting that SP4 somehow upgraded the MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) on the server, and the version does not match that on your development PC or test server. You'll need to download something called "MDAC Component Checker", which you can find by doing a search off the microsoft.com support site. Make sure important things (like ADO drivers or OLEDB drivers or any Visual Basic stuff you used) match the versions on your development PC. The CC program won't give you an accurate overall analysis (or, it hasn't done that for me), but at least it lists off all the DLL versions.

In fact by looking at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;327194 , it seems that the MDAC was updated. For what it's worth, I'm running MDAC 2.5 on my Win2k servers. My guess is that you had started with MDAC 2.5, maybe 2.5 SP2, and the servers got boosted to 2.6.

Also, I'm not sure on the accuracy of this next statement, but it's worth a checking into: I was programming a COM+ component for ASP in Visual C++ 6.0, using OLE DB and ATL, and Oracle 8i. I had a problem with the OraOLEDB driver (which I found to be more stable then Microsoft's provider). When I ran a procedure, I found out that it did not send VC++ a null-terminated string, and I got garbage characters after the varchar2 ended. So I thought it was just "my fault", and I programmed in a rather "clunky" fix. (VC++ is very different then ASP with database access.) I found out later on the OTN that it was a bug in the Oracle Provider! My exact problem was listed as being a bug fix, and a newer version of the driver had been released. Of course, we had already gone into production, and I couldn't upgrade the OraOLEDB without re-doing my code; it was decided that we'd keep "my" fix in until we upgraded to 9i. So hop on the OTN and make sure that you've got the latest Oracle Provider for OLE DB... read any bug release notes.

Good luck!

-Thomas Received on Tue Aug 19 2003 - 10:40:47 CDT