Tag Archives: listener

New in 19 : Oracle Network Log File Segmentation with LOG_FILE_NUM_listener_name and LOG_FILE_SIZE_listener_name

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Photo by Chris Greenhow on Unsplash

I started off the new year by reading the Oracle Database 19c New Features Guide and I came across a very nice new feature : Oracle Network Log File Segmentation. It is now possible to specify a maximum file size for listener logs and a maximum number of files to keep. In previous versions, only log.xml was segmented in chunks of 10Mb, but not the plain text listener.log.

The Net Services Administrator’s Guide briefly describes this feature and the Database Net Services Reference gives a definition of 2 new parameters in listener.ora :

  • LOG_FILE_NUM_listener_name : To specify the number of log file segments. At any point of time there can be only n log file segments where n is LOG_FILE_NUM_listener_name. If the log grows beyond this number, then the older segments are deleted.
  • LOG_FILE_SIZE_listener_name : To specify the size of each log file segment. The size is in MB.
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Use of Splunk with Oracle listener log files

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(Photo by Alfons Morales, on Unsplash)

There are several ways to dig for precious information in listener logs, for example this method described by Arup Nanda or this one by Liron Amitzi.
I currently work in an environment with 40+ servers and 550+ databases managed by Grid Infrastructure. I recently wanted to help a colleague who was experiencing problems with a brand new installed application. Her application should connect to a database in another VLAN. Our first intuition was to check if the application could, at least, reach the database. Since the database resides on a Grid Infrastructure cluster, it would have been tedious to check all (scan-) listener logs spread accross all servers. This is where Splunk has proven useful.

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Database Service Firewall : Access Control to a PDB in RAC

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(Photo by Johannes Plenio, on Unsplash)

Conferences are great. Not only for the technical content, also for the people. Recently during DOAG, I had very interesting conversations (yes, several conversations 🙂 ) with Martin Berger about how to control who is connecting to which database in a complex environment. Among other topics, we mentioned that it was possible, starting with Oracle 12.2, to set Access Control Lists to allow connections to a database service (in Non-CDB or PDB) from specific IP addresses.
This new feature Database Service Firewall was introduced with Oracle 12.2. It should not to be confused with Database Firewall, which is a dedicated system used to monitor traffic from and to databases, and is part of Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall product.

As I never used Database Service Firewall, I decided to give it a try in a Multitenant environment with RAC.
My lab is a 2-node RAC cluster with Grid Infrastructure 18, a 18.3 RAC Container database called metal, and one pluggable database called opeth.

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