Aleph doesn't start: "TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested"

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 20

Description:
After a planned restart of our Aleph production servers this morning, the Aleph front-end application is not starting properly. We're using the following procedures to start the application:

# su - aleph
# /opt/sudo/bin/sudo /exlibris/aleph/u20_1/alephe/apache/bin/apachectl start (apache seems to start fine)
# su -
# /etc/init.d/exlibris start

The last step is where is seems to go wrong. The startup script completes very quickly (it usually takes several minutes) and it does not return any errors. However, it fails to start up any of the servers, the util w menu shows nothing running.

Both "dlib abc01" and util f/4 give this error:

Oracle error: handle_connection
ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested i
***************************************************
* No ORACLE connection - process is terminated... *
***************************************************

Resolution:
A check of the listener and Oracle on the back-end server showed processes running, but the (Aleph) application server was still getting the "listener does not currently know of service requested" error.

"lsnrctl status" on the database server and a closer check of the processes running there showed that they were for *ARC* (-- which the site does not run). None of them were for Aleph.

A restart of the listener and Oracle on the back-end server were successful: "lsnrctl status" and the processes showed aleph processes.

The site was then able to successfully restart the aleph servers/daemons/queues with /etc/init.d/exlibris.

Note: it's unclear what was different/incorrect about the first start of the listener and Oracle.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013