Connecting Windows Clients to Oracle

[Wayne Happ]

I'm a new Oracle user.

I've installed Oracle 9i on a Linux RedHat machine V9.0 and it's running.

I took a Windows XP machine and installed the Oracle client on it along with
PL/SQL developer from All-Around-Software.

I try to connect and I get an error message ORA-12545 "Connect failed
because target host or object does not exist".

The listener log on the Linux box indicates that something tried to connect.

Could someone be so kind as to direct me to the proper Oracle documentation
to get a Windows XP client to Linux server connection running?

Regards,

Wayne Happ

[Hans Forbrich]

Re: Connecting Windows Clients to Oracle

Wayne Happ wrote:

>
I'm a new Oracle user.
>
I've installed Oracle 9i on a Linux RedHat machine V9.0 and it's running.
>
I took a Windows XP machine and installed the Oracle client on it along with
PL/SQL developer from All-Around-Software.
>
I try to connect and I get an error message ORA-12545 "Connect failed
because target host or object does not exist".
>
The listener log on the Linux box indicates that something tried to connect.
>
Could someone be so kind as to direct me to the proper Oracle documentation
to get a Windows XP client to Linux server connection running?
>
Regards,
>
Wayne Happ

The docco is at http://docs.oracle.com - look up the Oracle Networking
document. It's pretty involved and pretty boring (but complete). As a
short cut:

On the Linux box, check in your $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory.
You should have a few files - listener.ora, sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora
(There should be a similar directory %ORACLE_HOME%\n etwork\admin on the
XP box, with similar files.)

LISTENER.ora - basically the config for your listener. Needs to be on
the same server as your listener. Identifies which services the listener
gets to support and how it supports them. (btw: start the listener
using 'lsnrctl start', flip side is 'lsnrctl stop') when you start it,
the listener should mumble something about the TCP/IP 1521 port ready
for your database. (Don't need this on the XP box!)

SQLNET.ora contains some global config - ignore it for now.

TNSNAMES.ora is the one all "oracle net" clients use to find the service
(service in this case = the instance managing the database, although
there could be other kinds of services). Your XP machine needs to have
a TNSNAMES.ora that has a service similar to the one in the TNSNAMES.ora
on the Linux box. (I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions here)

If it still doesn't work after lining up the stars/moon/sun and getting
the TNSNAMES.ora to look 'right', post both TNSNAMES.ora files &
possibly the LISTENER.ora file.