Oracle and Apache TNS Problems

Today was a confusing world of Oracle's TNS and Apache not talking to each other…

Several installs later on different PCs with, supposedly, the same settings and one PC just wouldn't go. No matter what I tried, Apache kept groaning about TNS not being able to resolve the name. Fantastic.

After spending an age checking ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and a host of other stuff it was eventually tracked to the environment variables not being passed so Apache wasn't recognising HOME or SID.

A browse through the Apache docs found that you can force Apache to get the environment settings, although why this is needed now when its been doing happy on every other PC I've no idea.

If you get a similar problem and ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID are both set in your environment (system, not user!) then try forcing Apache to get them. Not enough space on here to ho into how exactly, but check the Apache docs for how to! It'll also depend on what version of Apache your running on exactly how this is done (I think!).

This problem was on Windows XP and Apache 2.2.

Have a lot of fun! … where's my SuSE box gone???