Oracle TNS: net service name is incorrecly specified

Question

Help! I\'m a newbie to Oracle who\'s trying to access a database on an old server we inherited for a client.

I\'m confident I have the oracle database and listener start

Answer 1

I have edited the tnsnames.ora file to change the host to 127.0.0.1 rather than an external url and am able to successfully tnsping my connection, but am not getting much further.

The last time that happened to me (tnsping works but sqlplus does not, same error message you got), the issue was that someone had copied the tnsnames.ora file from a Windows machine, and left the wrong line feed codes in.

If that is the case, you need to do some dos2unix.

These files are very sensitive to "correct" white-space and tabbing.

Someone should complain to Oracle about that.