Thank you for the follow up.

yes that did work for me… both in IE and removing ALL oracle related cookies within Firefox. Doing that manually raises some questions for me but yes it works.

Rui,

Thank you for the report from Canada – it is good to hear that it is not just an isolated issue. I wonder if something is written to the cookies that essentially states: the last server that authenticated this user is: xyz, so if that server goes offline, the verification step immediately after the login fails. What is strange is that I told Internet Explorer 8 to delete all temp Internet files and cookies, yet I still found 6 files in the cookies directory that contained the word “oracle”. Rui, if you are running Windows, can you navigate to the Cookies directory (I found it in C:\Users\usernamehere\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\, where usernamehere is hooper in the above screen captures) and verify that no files exist whose contents contain the word oracle. If you do find such files, move them to a different folder, completely close all Internet Explorer windows, and then try to log into the OTN site. I am curious to know if this solution also works for you.

At times it would be nice to attach an image to an OTN post to better illustrate concepts when helping people. I recall reading some of the discussions in the Community Feedback and Discussion forum about posting images. If I remember correctly, when the feature was enabled, it was occasionally abused – used to post image spam messages and inappropriate images for a work environment. Additionally, some of the members posting in the feedback threads indicated that they pay a fee to their Internet host for every megabyte of data that is downloaded (this is currently the case for me at home – at the time of the thread I had a dial-up modem connection), and that the majority of the pictures that were attached were not sufficiently helpful to justify the data transfer costs.

The single-sign on system that allows a single log in to work for the OTN forums and Metalink (My Oracle Support) has no doubt caused some problems. I used a different email address on the OTN forums than I had used for access to Metalink. To work around the problem, I just set up the Metalink (My Oracle Support) account to accept the email address that I use on the OTN forums. That seemed to solve most of the single-sign on problems that I experienced.

I have no experience with Oracle Mix. I think that I was also experiencing problems with corrupt OTN downloads a month or two ago, but I wrote it off as a problem on my end of the connection.

Thanks for the report from Australia.

I also remember having a problem downloading software from OTN some months back which I managed to resolve by switching to Google’s DNS resolution. I think the ‘local’ copy of the file that was being served to Australia was corrupted.

You might have found something interesting. Have you had any difficulty logging into OTN?

I executed a trace route from home, and see that my computer is picking up the same IP address for forums.oracle.com as I received when using Google’s DNS server.

C:\Users\hooper>tracert forums.oracle.com
 
Tracing route to e4606.b.akamaiedge.net [184.25.186.174]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
 
  1     1 ms     1 ms     9 ms  192.yyy.yyy.yyy
  2    90 ms    86 ms    69 ms  32.z
  3    79 ms   103 ms    70 ms  127.z
  4    82 ms    98 ms    99 ms  178.z
  5    67 ms   100 ms    87 ms  65.z
  6    89 ms   101 ms    94 ms  146.z
  7    76 ms    83 ms    99 ms  4.z
  8    77 ms    65 ms    73 ms  3.z
  9    94 ms   131 ms    79 ms  253.z
 10   112 ms   110 ms    99 ms  TenGigE0-0-0-0.GW2.CLE3.ALTER.NET [65.195.240.17]
 11   116 ms    94 ms   116 ms  0.xe-3-2-0.XL2.CLE3.ALTER.NET [152.63.67.125]
 12   148 ms   122 ms   116 ms  0.ge-5-2-0.XL4.CHI13.ALTER.NET [152.63.64.218]
 13   133 ms   238 ms   209 ms  0.ae4.BR3.CHI13.ALTER.NET [152.63.66.78]
 14     *      119 ms   145 ms  204.255.168.154
 15   128 ms   103 ms    97 ms  a184-25-186-174.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com [184.25.186.174]

Do you see the same IP address when running tracert forums.oracle.com ?

Thank you for the comment. I actually saw your comment in the OTN thread, and tried deleting cookies before posting this blog article. At least using the interface offered by Internet Explorer 8, deleting the cookies had no effect. If I closed all the way out of all Internet Explorer windows, and then restarted Internet Explorer, forums.oracle.com would then consider me to not be logged in, so I could see the web pages again until I attempted to log in.

Windows 7 does a very effective job of hiding the actual location of cookies when using the Explorer interface. After seeing your post in this article, I decided to use a Windows command line to locate the cookies. The cookies are stored in the following location:
C:\Users\usernamehere\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\

In that location, I found files with the names of 0BVVBRKM.txt, 1OELPVJ6.txt, G66FDXTE.txt, KP4K9CJF.txt, MH2D4B9W.txt, ZER63WOZ.txt (these names are probably unique to my computer) that contained the word Oracle, so I moved those files to a different location. I then tried forums.oracle.com again – same error. I closed all Internet Explorer windows (confirmed that all related processes were closed with Task Manager), and then tried the forums.oracle.com site again. This time I was able to successfully log in.

In short, your suggestion worked, but it was not as straight forward as I expected. Thanks for the idea. On a side note, the OTN Forums work fine in Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 (100% success rate – OK, it worked 1 out of 1 time).

I’ve encountered same problem many times during last couple of months. You can see in this thread the problem is “being worked to resolve”. Try to delete forums.oracle.com cookies, it helped me last time to log in successfully.