Frustrating TOra/QT Bug

I have been preaching the wonders of Toolkit for Oracle (TOra) to my colleague. I got him to install it, and it would not connect to the database. No matter what we tried he failed with the error ORA-12545, "Connect failed because target host or object does not exist". He was less than impressed.

We sit in the same office, use nearly identical laptops, run the same OS (Fedora Core 4) and use the same database servers. I had gotten the same error previously and remedied it by fixing resolv.conf. I noticed that when I got this error, my sqlnet.log contained "PROTOCOL=TCP" while his contained "PROTOCOL=beq". I went down the painful path of comparing strace outputs to no avail. He googled. No joy.

Finally, my colleague read the help forum on TOra's Sourceforge project page. He found this thread from March, 2005:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1249082&forum_id=52737

Joy! In summary, the thread indicates that there was a bug at some point in qt-3.3.4 that caused problems for TOra. We checked versions, and mine was more current. He had 3.3.4-15 while I had 3.3.4-17.4. The difference was due to the fact that I had enabled the kde yum repository. He enabled kde-redhat and kde-redhat-all and ran 'yum upgrade'. The QT libraries were upgraded and the TOra problem was solved.

To enable the two yum repositories, edit /etc/yum.repos.d/kde-redhat.repo. Set 'enable=1' on the top pair of repositories. That's it.