Windows – Oracle program “lsnrctl” is missing after the installation of 32bit Oracle client

installationlisteneroraclewindows-server

I cleaned up my computer for all old Oracle stuff using Uninstall (OUI) and then later used regedit to delete all references to Oracle and then deleted all remains of Oracle directories.

I have HP ProBook with Windows 7 (64-bit) and I want to install a 32 bit Oracle client on it. I need to be connected to an Oracle 11gR2 database on a remote server by OCI, ODBC and OLEDB.

I have done this installation tens of times before, but this time I am stuck.

The command lsnrctl isn't present after the installation, and as expected then, the lsnrctl.exe binary is not present under the Oracle home directory (in BIN) as it should be.

This test shows the frightening situation:

C:\Oracle\product\11.2.0\client_1\BIN>lsnrctl status
'lsnrctl' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

I did the same operations and installation on more time, but with the same result.
Why does this happen and what can I do to straight it out, other than re-installing the whole Windows 7?

Best Answer

There doesn't appear to be a problem.

The listener is a process that generally runs on the database server, not on the client machine. Doing a client-only install will not install a listener. If you want to have a listener on your machine, you'd need to do a database install (though you can do a software-only install rather than actually creating a database).

If you're just trying to connect to a remote database, however, you'd use the listener that is (presumably) running on the database server. It's theoretically possible to install a listener on one machine for a database running on another machine but that isn't particularly common. It would be extremely, extremely unusual to install a listener on the client machine that listens for connections to a database on a remote server.