Why would you need to restart your listener to add a new instance? Any 8i+ instance, if configured appropriately, should automaticaly register with the default listener when you start it up - no listener config or restart required. Regards, Brandon -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of JayMiller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx We want the ability to bring up any instance on any box and the only way we could do that would be if every listener on every box was configured for every Oracle database in the company. I suppose we could do that, but there's less management involved to maintaining one listener per instance (otherwise whenever we added a new instance anywhere we'd need to modify and restart all our listeners). Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message or attachments hereto. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of this company shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by it. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l