Oracle Net8 Configuration and Troubleshooting

Appendix E. Environment and Registry Variables

There are a few environment variables that are particularly relevant to Net8. The most useful of these variables is probably TNS_ADMIN, which allows you to customize the location of your Net8 configuration files.

Environment variables are used on Linux and Unix systems for the settings described in this chapter. Environment variables may be used on Windows NT systems too, but with Windows NT, you also have the option of specifying these settings in the registry.

Net8 Environment Variables

Environment variables that you can use to control Net8 activity allow you to do the following:

• Specify a custom location for Net configuration files (TNS_ADMIN)

• Specify a default net service name (LOCAL or TWO_TASK)

• Enable the use of shared sockets under Windows NT (USER_SHARED_SOCKET)

On case-sensitive operating systems such as Linux and Unix, environment variables are case-sensitive. On such systems, the names of Net8-related environment variables are always uppercase.

TNS_ADMIN

On most systems, Net8 configuration files such as tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora are stored in the $ORACLE_HOME /network /admin directory. On a few Unix systems, you may find the default directory to be /var/opt/oracle. If you don’t like this location, you can customize it using the TNS_ADMIN environment variable. Just set TNS_ADMIN to point to the directory containing your configuration files. For example:

export TNS_ADMIN=/etc/oracle/net8

If you’re going to set TNS_ADMIN, you need to ...