Qihua I assume that this is an installation from scratch which no other oracle homes other than for RAC and ASM perhaps. If you have a separate home for ASM it could be running from it. There are two ways to get at it You could use crs_stat -p to get detailed information about the resource and look at the ACTION_SCRIPT variable Or You could attach to the listener (if you kind of know the port) use the current_listener clause and the status will show the listener.ora used to start the listener. -Krish _____ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of qihua wu Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2007 8:45 PM To: oracle-l Subject: creating listener by NETCA throws error "a listener with the name already exists" but there is no existing listener.ora Hi, all, Happy new year:) I created an oracle 10g rac, and when startup NETCA manually and try to create the default listener whose name is "LISTENER", it complaints that that listener already exists. But the strange thing is that there is no file named listener.ora under $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin, and TNS_ADMIN is not set. When run the command crs_stat, I can see the listener listed. My problem is where oracle looks for the definition of the listener apart from listener.ora Thanks, Qihua