Oracle and HTTP_PROXY

I’ve been working with Oracle lately. I’ve installed a local instance of Oracle XE to use while developing to make it easier for me to test NHibernate Mappings and Fluent Migrator (which is a really nice product, there will be a blog post about it someday).

Anyway, I’ve had all sorts of strange errors happen to me, and the strange thing was that none of these happened at home, only at work:

Immediately after install, http://localhost:8080/apex wasn’t working. Checking the logs gave me no useful information, they looked like this:
2010-11-23 16:08:35.574: [ CSSCLNT][3364]clsssinit: error(33 ) in OCR initialization
[ OCRUTL][6304]u_set_comp_error: Parameter was NULL
[ OCRUTL][6304]u_set_ocr_error: Parameter was NULL
2010-11-26 12:17:41.822: [ OCROSD][6304]utgdv:1:could not open registry key SOFTWARE\Oracle\ocr os error The system could not find the environment option that was entered.
[ OCRUTL][6304]u_set_gbl_comp_error: Parameter was NULL
[ OCRUTL][6304]u_set_gbl_comp_error: Parameter was NULL
2010-11-26 12:17:41.822: [ OCRRAW][6304]proprinit: Could not open raw device
2010-11-26 12:17:41.822: [ default][6304]a_init:7!: Backend init unsuccessful : [33]
[ OCRUTL][6304]u_set_ocr_error: Parameter was NULL

All suggestions i found on the net pointed to using SQL*plus to update and check system variables. But SQL*plus gave me this:

Error 46 initializing SQL*Plus
HTTP proxy setting has incorrect value
SP2-1502: The HTTP proxy server specified by http_proxy is not accessible


 
OK, thats a hint: remove the HTTP_PROXY system variable (which I’ve set to be able to use cygwin, maven and other command line tools that needs to download stuff from the web). That fixed SQL*plus, but surprisingly also fixed Apex ??! And not because the browser was using HTTP_PROXY, I tried using telnet to port 8080. It the port is open and accepts input, but after typing the usual:

GET /apex HTTP/1.1
Location: locahost

the connection will hang indefinitely with no response.

Conclusion:
You can’t use the HTTP_PROXY system variable when running Oracle on your system!

Update: The subtitle of this blog is continous learning. And so I learn:
If you make sure that your HTTP_PROXY variable is a valid url:http://proxyserver:port/ it will work just fine…

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