Oracle Net8 Configuration and Troubleshooting

Discovery and Client Configuration

After you’ve created your Oracle Names server and defined your net service names, you’ll want to configure your client to use the Names server for net service name resolution. There are several ways that you can go about this. If you are using the well-known Names server addresses, you can have your clients automatically “discover” the Names servers on your network. If discovery doesn’t work, or if you are not using well-known Names server addresses, you can manually place entries in the sqlnet.ora file to point a client to a Names server.

Once you’ve made a client aware of the Oracle Names servers on the network, whether through discovery or sqlnet.ora entries, you need to modify the NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH entry in your sqlnet.ora file to include ONAMES as one of the names resolution options. For example, the following entry will cause a client to attempt net service resolution using Oracle Names first. Then, if that doesn’t work, the client will look in the tnsnames.ora file:

NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH = (ONAMES, TNSNAMES)

See Chapter 3, for a list of all the values that can be used with NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH.

Discovery

Oracle Names’ discovery features are described in Chapter 2. They are an attempt by Oracle to make the use of Oracle Names as easy as possible. As long as you use one of the well-known Names server addresses (see Chapter 2 for a list of these), your clients are supposedly able to discover and use a Names server automatically. While this sounds ...