OEM 10g Oracledbconsole problems in a Windows XP Pro environment

Question

I just figured why the new Oracle 10g OEM for windows(Windows XP Pro in my case) will not start up and the OracleDBConsole process fails with a return code of 2( Agent process exited abnormally during initialization).
I had my internet service connected last week through my cable company. Before that I could start up the Oracle 10g OEM without any problems but afterwards I started getting the OracleDBConsole error. After a little research and after re-installing Oracle several times I discovered the problem:
When you boot up your machine Oracle or perhaps oracledbconsole executes a Java applicaton called
getHostIPAddress, which gets the ip address of your machine. Another Java application is executed aftewards called getHostNameForIPAddress that attempts to derive the host name using the ip address returned from the getHostIPAddress function.
When I installed Oracle 10g with my internet connection active the getHostIPAddress function was returning the ip address assigned to me dynamically by my cable company. Function getHostNameForIPAddress was than called to get the hostname using this ip address and that's where the problem occurred. These are the errors as they appear in the installationactions... file in my
C:\Program Files\Oracle\Inventory\logs folder:
Calling Query netQueries10.1.0.2.0 getHostNameForIPAddress
ipAddress = 24.51.224.63
Query Exception: UnknownHostException
Query Exception Class: class oracle.sysman.oii.oiil.OiilQueryException
It appears that the getHostNameForIPAddress
cannot and probably should not be able to derive the hostname using a dynamically assigned ip address.
Solution:
1. I removed Oracle 10g from my machine and all references to it(registry). You might not have to do this
but I wanted no problems with the re-installation.
2. I turned off the cable modem.
3. I re-installed Oracle 10g and rebooted. This time the Oracle 10g OEM worked. The oracledbconsole and the emagent services were started successfully.
The ip address host was resolved to the localhost(127.0.0.0) not to the ipaddress assigned to me by my ISP because the internet connection was not active.
Note. You must leave your cable box disconnected or turned off until the oracledbconsole and the emagent services are started else you will start having the same problems. Everytime you startup your machine oracledbconsole or some other process executes the getHostIPAddress and getHostNameForIPAddress functions. That's why you have to wait until those two processes( oracledbconsole and the emagent ) are running before you can turn on your cable modem. Look in the processes tab of the windows task manager to verify that these two processes are running.

Answer 1

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