This is a fairly foolish pitfall that I stumbled into last week.

One of the recommendations from our external security audit was that we rename the listener from the default ‘LISTENER’ to something else.

I’m a little bit dubious as to how much renaming the listener increases ‘security’ since the listener name is visible in the Services panel or through net start. However, from a security POV it can’t do any harm, and it’s not a lot of effort, so we went ahead with it.

Semi-interestingly, as far as I can see there’s no Oracle recommendation to rename the listener.

This went fine for all but one of our servers.

The problem arose for one particular application which had some of its own services dependent on the Oracle listener. When the listener was renamed from ‘LISTENER’ to something else, the application didn’t come up.

Service dependencies are viewable under:

  • Services Panel
  • Right click the Listener Service
  • Select the Dependencies Tab
  • This shows services which are dependent on the Listener, and any services on which the listener depends.