Recently, I ran into a case in which the user was attempting to log on to a database, but the log on process was simply churning and churning without coming to an end. When I tried to perform a TNSPING against it, that process also failed to return any results, or at least not in a reasonable amount of time.
Thinking that it might be caused by a dead listener, I went on to the server and attempted to use the LSNRCTL command to restart the listener. Surprisingly, I was encountered with a number of errors, including “TNS-12541: TNS:no listener” and “TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error”.
I was able to find a much more knowledgeable DBA to locate root problem — On this Windows-hosted Oracle database server, the listener.log file had grown too large. Our solution:
1. Archive the old listener.log file
2. Create an empty file by the same name
After those two action, the listener was able to restart successfully, allowing user connections once again.