Hi Tom,

The company I work for has quite a number of Oracle databases,
on the order of 200 or so, including development, test, preprod,
production, etc, all hosted on Solaris, currently. We have a pretty
large number of unix clients of various flavors, mostly Solaris and
Linux (probably several hundred of those), and another several hundred
desktops which are Windows 2k and XP. Right now, we are using
tnsnames.ora files everywhere. The Windows boxes aren't too bad, we
have TNS_ADMIN pointed to a network drive where the tnsnames.ora file
sits. The unix boxes, clients and servers, all have individual
tnsnames.ora files. So, there is not one single, all encompassing,
tnsnames.ora anywhere.

Oracle used to have something called Names, or Name Server, and I
think it's been replaced by OID (Oracle Internet Directory), which
from what I read is an LDAP server, though it's not entirely clear
to me exactly what LDAP really is. I guess what I'm saying is that
I'm not exactly sure where to start. All I really want is a
convenient, reliable way to administer all those TNS names.
The couple of false starts I've already made, I get the idea that
LDAP is for a lot more than just TNS names, doing single-signon,
and other stuff like that. The documentation I've run into talks
about setting up an LDAP directory service, etc.

I guess my question is this:
I want to centrally administer my tnsnames.ora file. What product
should I be using, and what is the bare minimum required do that?

Pointers to the right docs, (ones that assume the reader has never
seen LDAP and doesn't know how it works) would be great. If you
could outline the approach for the bare minimum setup, that would
be even better.

Thanks for your help,

-Mark

in particular: