May be your DBA's has set up a profile which timesout session if you are inactive for a certain period of time. The default values are UNLIMITED but It may be that DBA's has created a new profile and assigned that profile to the user.

You can query dba_users to find out which profile has been assigned to you and also query dba_profiles to find out information about profile.

Sanjay

Originally posted by Shiva
I have my SQLPLUS client open and when it is inactive for maybe an hour, then I get 'end-of-file comunication channel' and I have to login again.
Is it possible in Oracle 8i to have an upper limit for the time period when a process can remain inactive ?

Shiva.