Andrei DANEASA

As a common practice all the servers have fixed IP address. Because not all Oracle Databases are installed directly on servers, but on laptops or different machines, it’s very probable that you have DHCP-provided IP address.
If you have DHCP IP address, your full computer name may vary, because different domain is added to computer name. Once the name can be mylaptop.oracle.com, the next day the name can be mylaptop.myhomenetwork.ro and so on.
The problem is when you want to install Oracle Database Enterprise Manager (web-based administration tool), because the installer is creating a folder on the disk have the name based on fully computer name. If you change the network the Enterprise Manager will not work, because it will not find a folder based on the actual computer name.
Enterprise Manager is not crucial , it’s just an interface, so if you don’t want to install it your database will work the same and you will configure the database through SQL*Plus or SQL Developer or Toad or what third party admin you want.

The workaround is to break this connection from networks and computer name. This is why we are installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, a dummy interface card, that have the highest priority and will respond first. Then we need to set an IP address like I described here
Windows has a hosts file when you can set static associations between an IP address and a hostname. The location of the hosts file is :

Normally in this file you will find just an entry:

You just need to add a new entry to this file with Loopback’s IP Address and your hostname like this:

The final check will be to ping your hostname and check if the loopback is responding.

In the next article you will find a script that will do everything automatically:

• installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter
• setting the IP
• adding the entry in hosts file
• pinging the hostname and checking the result.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Database, Programming.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.