Actually, that is what I mean. And (other than replacing the oracle host/sid/user/pass with "bla") that is the _exact_ script I'm running.

I'm not sure if the Oracle server is maintaining some kind of state associated with the host I'm connecting from or what. But when I put that into a pl file, and invoke it from the shell, it works the first time, but fails with subsequent invocations. (Which is really strange since each invocation is a separate process, separate connection to the DB, etc.)