Oracle and ISA Woes

Oracle combined ISA Server can be a real pain in the you know what. I use ISA Server in my development environment and I must connect to Oracle databases running in my primary client's office. About a month ago my connect speed to their databases really went to pot. It was the connect speed, after the inital connect everything was fine and the speed was quite acceptable. The connect, however, was in the order of about 25 seconds. If you know about TNS you probably already know that in most typical connection scenarios there are two connects each time (the first to the listener and then it gets handled over to another connection for the data connection). If I would drop outside the firewall I could have a connect time in the order of 200-250ms, right where it should be considering the number of hops required. Sounds a lot like a DNS issue based on the timeouts doesn't it.

After much poking, prodding, and web searching the only answer that seemed to there was making adjustments to the servers for the listening mode and a tweak on my ISA Server. Neither of which I was really all that keen to do.

But I found a solution that does work consistently and requires only a minor change on my part. The solution wasn't related to using Oracle but the relationship between the DNS resolution was the key. The DNS entries in the client site aren't published to the outside world (so I put them in my pc's local hosts file). For a lark, I placed the name into the local hosts file on the ISA Server and to my massive pleasure the connect time was returned to the 200-250ms connect time once again.

I do have access to the internal dns server on the client site so I may try having my dns server forward to it as well but for now I am just glad to have the issue resolved. It certainly is a pain to test software when there is such a massive delay between each connect. Really felt like part of my life was simply disappearing into the void.