Coldfusion 7 MX cannot understand oracle sometimes

Like every Monday,  I came into work today and got a complaint about our portal’s coldfusion business application not working.  The coldfusion applications were built on Coldfusion 7 MX and the backend was Oracle 11g. The exception on the portal look as below:

Portal Exception
The Coldfusion Exception

After 30 minutes of troubleshooting, I went into the coldfusion admin page and noticed that when verifying the oracle connection it gave an “Internal error: Net8 protocol error” message. Later on googling a bit, I understood from this forum post that the exception was because coldfusion 7 MX was unable to understand the “password about to expire” signals from oracle for the user that coldfusion uses to connect to oracle. So we reset the password for that user in the oracle database using the alter command and the problem was fixed.

Thanks to Google and the posted solution this production issue was solved within an hour.