Sysadmin Notebook: Can't start listener for XE :permission denied

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

I just reinstalled Oracle XE for Debian / Ubuntu and when I was about to start the listner, I got an error message about missing permissions.

Doing:

cd /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin
strace ./lsnrctl start

I found that it was trying to access /var/tmp/.oracle but this directory is owned by root, so:

chown -R oracle:dba /var/tmp/.oracle
chown -R oracle:dba /var/run/.oracle

And now it works correctly.

Sysadmin Notebook