It makes it hard to help when you don't provide the requested information (unless it's proprietary for some reason). Anyways, for a long, long time Oracle database links had a problem where if the "using" string was a tns alias it would work fine one day and then suddenly it would stop working and then never work again until you dropped the db link and recreated it. I'm wondering if you're up against something similar. The workaround for the db link was to put the whole tns string (i.e anything after "ALIAS = ") into the using string. I wonder if it's possible to do something similar in the "SERVICE=" part of the log_archive_dest_2 parameter. It's worth a shot. Finn On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Charles Schultz <sacrophyte@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > Yes, I can sqlplus to the fal_server, fal_client, and all permutations of > our arch_log_dest_2 parameter. And yes, I end up in the standby database > when I sqlplus to the standby database. =) Not knowing what parameter you > are looking for with "remote"; we do not have a remote listener setup, but > the passwordfile is. >