Futzing with 10g Connection Manager

I'd like to think I'm somewhat proficient using Oracle's Connection Manager product. After all, I first implemented CMAN in 8.1.6 for connection pooling. I then used CMAN to receive database traffic through a firewall. Pretty simple stuff, but I could get it to work. Sure, CMAN had it's shortcomings, but there were ways around most of them. Migrating through the 9i versions was no problem; install the cman in a new $OH, copy the cman.ora file and start it up. No fuss, no muss.

While investigating a related connection problem, Oracle Support suggested testing my problem on a 10g connection manager. "No problem", I said confidently knowing the 9i upgrade was a piece of cake. Lets just say things are a little different in the 10g world. Oracle has addressed some of CMAN's shortcomings in the latest release. Below are some of the things I encountered during my upgrade.

Looking through a new window
The first thing I noticed was cmctl now has a new set of commands. I found myself doubting that I ever ran connection manager in the past. A quick review of the 10g connection manager architecture gave me a foundation for the new environment.

CMAN.OR Migration
10g comes with this neat little tool called cmmigr. I used this tool to migrate my working cman.ora file into a non-working cman.ora file.

Tweaking cman.ora file #1
Here's where the real work came in. I had to tweak my cman.ora file to include my host's IP number. One of the nice things about 9.2 cman was you could use (HOST=) in your configuration and the connection manager would automatically use the hostname it was running on. I used this to my advantage to have a generic cman.ora file that I could run on multiple hosts. Since this is only a test, I'll leave this mystery for later.

Starting CMAN
I have what I think is a correct cman.ora file now. I start cmctl and issue the ADMINISTER command. No problem. I then try to STARTUP the connection manager and get a "TNS-04012: unable to start Oracle Connection Manager". The next thing you learn is there is an alert.log file in $OH/network/log that you can check. I had a couple errors in my alert.log that looked like:

(LOG_RECORD=(TIMESTAMP=18-JUL-2005 11:43:35)(EVENT=Failed to start listener process)(REASON=)(OPN=65)(NS1=12545)(NS2=12560)(NT1=515)(NT2=2))

Hmm, nothing useful there. I go back to the docs and see that cman now needs a listener to pass connections off to cmgw. So I try to start a listener process on my own and realized there was no lsnrctl in $OH/bin. Aha! I only installed cman and not the listener. Install the listener components and retry. SUCCESS!