Oracle Net8 Configuration and Troubleshooting

Centralized Naming

Centralized naming uses Oracle Names, which is a soon-to-be obsolete Net8 product developed by Oracle that allows you to centralize net service name resolution. Instead of looking up a net service name in a tnsnames.ora file on the client, Net8 can query a centrally managed Names server. The obvious advantage to using Oracle Names is that you are free to change net service name definitions without having to push tnsnames.ora files out to all your clients.

Tip

Support for Oracle Names is being quickly phased out in favor of the LDAP solution represented by OID. The terminal release of Oracle Names will be 8.2. If you are thinking of implementing Names, don’t. Use OID instead. If you are currently running Names, you should be planning your switch to an LDAP-based solution.

Redundancy and Scalability

For purposes of redundancy and scalability, you can have multiple Oracle Names servers running at one time. Net service name definitions can be automatically replicated to all Names servers. That way, if any one server goes down, clients will still be able to use the others. You may also distribute the client load over those multiple Names servers.

A large distributed environment might have multiple Names servers divided into several regions. Each region would be administered separately, but communication would still occur to ensure that any Names server could resolve any net service name. Figure 2.3 illustrates such an environment.

Figure 2-3. Responsibility may be delegated ...