Location of tnsnames.ora for Tora and Oracle XE Client
I Googled far and wide and did not see a CLEAR answer to my question, hopefully this will help others.
I have installed the debian oracle-xe-client and tora packages (tora rebuilt for oracle) on Ubuntu 8.04.
However, I did not know where I was supposed to place the tnsnames.ora file for my databases. I have tried running Tora with the environment variable of TNS_ADMIN set to the file where I placed my tnsnames.ora, however that did not work as Tora did not 'see' the file or its entries apparently. I know this works because I copied it from a Debian Etch box with the client and server installed.
I had even added a 'network/admin' directory structure to the //usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client (ORACLE_HOME) with the tnsnames.ora but also with no success.
Now for the solution:
Simply remember that TNS_ADMIN points to the directory where the tnsnames.ora is and it will work. :)
I do have a suggestion that both Tora and sqlplus use a config file to set these directory(s) in addition to the overriding ability of the environment variable, TNS_ADMIN as is usually the case with UNIX apps (and thus expected).
Thank you,
Jason