ORA-06401

Anon

I found :
Warning: _oci_open_server: ORA-06401: NETCMN: invalid driver designator in .....

What can i do ?

Thank's

Anon

The connect string contains an invalid driver designator.

Check your Oracle client installation on the PHP server.
Can you connect from your PHP server to your Oracle DB using SQLNet ( via SQLPlus for example ) ?

JBL

Anon

I can connect my Oracle DB (Oracle 8.1.5i)using SQL*Plus.
Invalid driver designator, what's mean ?

Anon

I can connect my Oracle DB (Oracle 8.1.5i)using SQL*Plus.
Invalid driver designator, what's mean ?

Anon

You can connect to a remote oracle DB by specifying a connect string of the form:

@:XXXXXX where XXXXXX describe your connection ( remote address, port , ...)

This error occurs if the connect string if malformed:
@TN:XXX
or
@;XXX

Check your connect string if you specify it directly ( not the usual way since sqlnet v2 ) or the TNSNAMES.ORA for correct syntax.

but this is far beyond the limits of this forum

JBL

Anon

6401, 00000, "NETCMN: invalid driver designator"
// Cause: The login (connect) string contains an invalid driver designator.
// Action: Correct the string and re-submit.

Anon

Based on this discussion and some others I got around this problem by using Notepad to put all of the configuration data in tnsnames.ora onto one line, instead of several lines as Net8 Assistant will do by default.

vmachan

Putting all the configuration data all on one line worked for me too.

Thanks

Anon

Fantastic, It WORKS!! after 4 hours of reading the forums I have got it to work, or should I say you have.

Only question is WHY??? does one line affect the connection in TSNNames.ora?

Thanks

Mark

Anon

Hi Mark,
I am Oracle DBA and have manipulated these ".ora" files for many an application, but never have I had to put everything on one line to make it work.
So to answer your question - this is what I think.
Whatever code reads this file, does not work well with carriage returns (probably uses fgets asn 'C').
I know this does not really answer your question. But that is as much as I know about this particular problem/solution.

Vinnie.

Anon

I can't tell you enough thank you for solving this problem. I've been at it for 4 straight days now - going to Barnes and Nobles reading TCP/IP, Oracle networking books, searching internet sites and so on, with no luck. Finally after watching Ken Burns' 'Mark Twain' documentary, I got back on the computer and WHAM!!!! the next hit was your solution - about a minute. Thank God.

PS (1)if you read Vinayak D. Machan (RE🙂 that makes no sense about why ALL the 'service name' attributes has to be in one line. That is something that the PHP folks should look at.

(2) Since I'm new at PHP, can we get the PHP modules (source codes) and examine them?

(3) Is there a way the good folks at PHP can mark a thread that has a positive response, ie, a solution to a problem? The frustation of NOT searching would be a great plus.

By the way - That was my 2nd PHP installation on another machine. I had absolutely no problems on my 1st install. It's the same PHP version on both machine.

Thansk again

Raymond

Anon

I'm a technician, experiencing this problem with a user. I am not familiar with the application, and in an attempt to edit the TNSNAMES.ORA file, I came across 7 files that share that name. How do I differenciate? Which is the config file I need?

vmachan

You need to look at the TNSNAMES.ORA in the <ORACLE_HOME>/network/admin directory, where <ORACLE_HOME> is where you installed your Oracle client software.

Anon

I have e pRoblem with Forms 6I- I can'ot configurate Forms 6i. Wenn i give a user name with password and a string then i bekam a messages ORA-06401: NETCMN: invalid driver designator in .....

Wot kan i do?

vmachan

It seems that you have not installed the Oracle client software on the machine and it is therefore having problems finding the driver, etc to successfully connect to the Oracle database.
After installing the Oracle client:
- create aliases in the TNSNAMES for your Oracle database using Oracle Net Assistant or Net Easy Config
- verify connectivity to the database with TNSPING and SQLPLUS.

If the above works then you should be able to connect from Oracle Forms as well.

Anon

I had same issue and solved by removing DOS Carriage returns from tnsnames.ora file. In Linux, do this using dos2unix command. If you doing a binary transfer of tnsnames.ora from Windows to Linux/Unix then trailing DOS c/r remains at end of each line.