Sorry I can't help you with the connection problem, but I do have a few
words of platform advice based on our experience.  We ran Oracle on our
HP987 system for about 4 years, then the releases froze in the 7.3 range.
Other operating systems were getting 8.x releases, so we saw the
handwriting on the wall and started a migration process.  We were running 4
instances with 20 - 30 applications or tablespaces under each instance.  A
few of these apps were quite large yet performance was excellent on the
HP3000, even with 3 other non-Oracle apps.

NT appeared to be the best choice based on price so we started our
migration.  To make a long story short, we have been able to run only 1 - 3
apps per 4-way NT server and have been plagued by having to reboot these
servers every couple of days.   We got up to 25 NT servers and still had
much more left to migrate off the HP3000, so we looked to HPUX to try to
centralize these apps once again.

We brought in an HP9000 N440 2 way server, 5gb memory.  We have been able
to consolidate the NT servers and migrate most of the rest of the HP3000
Oracle apps to this one box.  Performance is better - it took quite an
upgrade to beat out the HP3000 as a transaction processor.   Management,
allocation of space to your instances, will now take quite a bit more of
your time.

Be aware that Oracle has implemented a pricing scheme based on chip speed,
with a 1.5 factor penalty for Risc vs Intel.  This is a big plus  for Risc
since you should be able to run 30x the number of apps for 1.5x the Oracle
license price.

If migrating your Oracle apps to Turboimage is not an option,  then Oracle
on HPUX or even on Sun is the way to go.  Sun has other advantages such as
more Internet apps and utilities available, in case you need to do this.