The site says xdb

Its not always your site says anything to you

But mine did…It said ‘XDB’.

It was my grails application.This is the login window Firefox showed be gleefully with the message

The site says XDB

IE played dumb(er) - It too presented a login screen - but had a simpler message

XDB

I was in the process of trying a few things in Grails - making those cool domain classes and controllers when it happened. It was working a few minutes ago and then boom !!! it stopped.
And since I am so new to Grails- I thought maybe I had messed up something.

Surprisingly google didn’t get many results either.

Anyway it was enough to tell me the problem was with Oracle

And since I was at that time creating a new Oracle Database on my laptop- <snap> that made perfect sense. (Though I was simply creating a new database instance and not fiddling with the one that my app was using)

Once I stopped and restarted all the Oracle listeners -the problem went away.

So moral of the story ? If the site says XDB- restart your Oracle instance.

There may be more elegant solutions out there- but this is what worked for me