MS ACCESS to ORACLE Connectivity

[jlewis99]

Database - Oracle 9i on W2k Server
Clients - W2k professional with Oracle 8i client installed.
Development enviroment is VB .NET and MS Access 2000.


Need to login to an Oracle 9i database located behind a firewall.

We can login with SQL PLUS, Perl with win32::Odbc and the Odbctst.exe utility that was installed
with Oracle 8i client etc. from outside the firewall. No problem.

But when we try Access 2000 (with ODBC) or VB .NET (with OLE) outside the firewall
we get this error message:

ODBC CAll Failed
ORA-12535 TNS: OPERATION TIMED OUT
ODBC Driver's SQLConnectAttr failed (#0)

I've looked at the oracle error. It's nebulous and would persue it more but
other non-MS products work fine ( SQL PLUS, Perl with win32::ODBC, ODBCTst.exe, TOAD etc.)

Inside the firewall we can link to tables with Access 2000.

I would blame the firewall except, that as stated, other non-MS products work.

We've tried both the Oracle ODBC driver and the MS ODBC driver for Oracle.

It seems 'something' in VB and Access is trying to set a connection attribute wrong and it seems
to be related to the firewall (We can get Access 2000 to work INSIDE the firewall) But what?

Any Ideas?