Oracle Distilled

Problem

When attempting to start the listener you receive the following error.

[oracle@ora2 ~]$ lsnrctl start

LSNRCTL for Linux: Version 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on 06-JUL-2010 10:38:43

Copyright (c) 1991, 2009, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Message 1070 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNSTNS-12545: Message 12545 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNS
 TNS-12560: Message 12560 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNS
  TNS-00515: Message 515 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNS
   Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory
[oracle@ora2 ~]$

Or you may receive the following when attempting to use tnsping.

[oracle@ora2 ~]$ tnsping proddb

TNS Ping Utility for Linux: Version 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on 06-JUL-2010 10:38:30

Copyright (c) 1997, 2009, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Message 3511 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNSTNS-03505: Message 3505 not found; No message file for product=network, facility=TNS
[oracle@ora2 ~]$

Or you might have attempted a connection using SQL*Plus and received the following error.

[oracle@ora2 ~]$ sqlplus /nolog
Error 6 initializing SQL*Plus
SP2-0667: Message file sp1<lang>.msb not found
SP2-0750: You may need to set ORACLE_HOME to your Oracle software directory
[oracle@ora2 ~]$

Of the three errors messages, the message returned using SQL*Plus is the most descriptive and actually points to the problem causing all three.

The above mentioned utilities along with others included with the Oracle software need to have the ORACLE_HOME environment variable pointing to the proper location. In the above mentioned cases the utilities were unable access messages files. In particular the both the lsnrctl and tsnping were unable to access message files ORACLE_HOME/network/mesg and SQL*Plus as unable to access message files in ORACLE_HOME/sqlplus/mesg.

The message files contain status and error message used by the various utilities provided by Oracle.

Solution

Set the ORACLE_HOME environment variable to the proper location and retry the utility.