Easy Connect does make life easier for most people, but the great majority of our apps use a generic username/pw which is kept in ini files so they automatically connect to Oracle when started. Thus, if the server name ever changed, we'd still have to update all the ini files instead of the tnsnames.ora files. This is a production facility with barebones IT staff so I'm trying to make this as painless as possible. I think having the tnsnames.ora file on the Oracle server (Win 2003) as a share we can map to would be the simplest to setup and maintain. Most of their servers are Netware. On 2/8/06, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > You could consider just skipping tnsnames.ora and OID. > > With 10g you get easy connect. > > e.g. sqlplus scott/tiger@//someserver:1529/orcl -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l