Listeners and ORA Files in ORACLE

In Oracle 11g Express Edition if "Get Started" is not working;

There could be many problems one of them can be,

LISTENER SERVICE

Make Sure that you Listener Service is started by going to "services.msc"




LISTENER CONTROL

Or type "LSNRCTL" in command Prompt, it will open Listener shell,
You can check the status, start and stop listener using this utility



Status




TNSPINGING

Try Pinging to the ORACLE Host using TNSPING command




ORA FILES

May be your TSNAMES.ORA is not pointing to the correct HOST NAME

ORA Files can be seen in the following path, (In My Case its C: Drive)

C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\11.2.0\server\network\ADMIN

Listener.ora
Sqlnet.ora
Tnsnames.ora

These 3 ORA Files has to point to a proper HOST NAME.
Example :

In LISTENER.ORA

LISTENER =
(DESCRIPTION_LIST =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC1))
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = SGBLS044.xyz.com)(PORT = 1521))
)
)


In TNSNAMES.ORA

XE =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = SGBLS044.xyz.com)(PORT = 1521))
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SERVER = DEDICATED)
(SERVICE_NAME = XE)
)
)

SQLNET ORA Entry

And in SQLNET.ORA, there should be one entry for NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH =
In our above case,
It will be, NAMES.DIRECTORY_PATH = XE, since XE is our TNSNAMES Directory Path Alias

If all of the above are correct, then please forgive me :) : ) Post your problem in comment section, let me try what ever is possible with that :)