Oracle Net8 Configuration and Troubleshooting

Structure of This Book

When we designed this book, we tried to collect in one place all the essential information that you need to work with Net8. We’ve divided this information into four parts:

Part I, provides an introduction to Net8, its architecture, its functionality, and its major components. It includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, introduces Net8 and describes the various components that combine to implement Net8’s functionality. Chapter 1 also discusses stack communications and provides a brief overview of Net8’s management utilities.

• Chapter 2, discusses name resolution, which is the process of taking a human-readable network address and correlating it with a specific network address that is meaningful to the underlying network protocol being used. Net8 supports several different naming methods, each useful in different situations.

Part II, comprises the major portion of the book. Here you’ll find chapters showing how to configure Net8 on the server and on the client. You’ll learn to configure advanced features such as load balancing and failover, and you’ll learn about LDAP, Oracle Names, and Connection Manager. Part II includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 3, describes the process of configuring Net8 on clients that need to query an Oracle database across a network.

• Chapter 4, shows you how to configure Net8 on a server. Most of this chapter is focused on the task of getting a Net8 listener up and running.

• Chapter 5, describes MTS, the feature of Net8 that allows a server to support large numbers of client connections by sharing server processes among those connections.

• Chapter 6, presents Net8’s increasing support for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as implemented by the Oracle Internet Directory (OID). LDAP is now the preferred name resolution method in cases where you want to centralize control over net service names.

• Chapter 7, shows how to implement name resolution via an Oracle Names server. Oracle Names is Oracle’s proprietary name resolution software.

• Chapter 8, describes these two Net8 features, which are often used in Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) environments.

• Chapter 9, describes Net8’s connection concentration and multi-protocol support features. These are implemented using an optional Net8 component known as Connection Manager.

Part III, will be useful when things go wrong with Net8. It includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 10, shows how to use Net8’s diagnostic and troubleshooting features. These include the tnsping utility, log files, and trace files.

• Chapter 11, describes a number of commonly encountered problems and suggests ways of resolving them.

Part IV, contains seven appendixes full of useful syntax reference information. You’ll find references for sqlnet.ora parameters, tnsnames.ora parameters, listener.ora parameters, names.ora parameters, Net8-related registry and environment variables, and MTS initialization parameters and performance views.