ORA-12546: TNS:permission denied after restarting the system

Question

I have

• Oracle Linux 7
• Oracle XE 18c
• 2 vhosts Everything is local, so this should be simple.

Yesterday I finished setting up the vhosts, which need to connect to the database. I had to install php-oci8 (and some other missig php packages). After that, everything worked fine, and I even saved some data on the DB.

Then I shut down the system - not for the first time since I installed all the oracle DB stuff, but for the first time since I installed php-oci8. This morning I wanted to continue testing what's on the vhosts and I get the ORA-12546: TNS:permission denied error. I googled for a solution, followed some examples on how to change the permission, but to no avail.

I'm a QA person, not a developer or system administrator, so please keep answers simple for me. Also, tell me what else you need to know and I will provide the info.

Answer 1

Writing this question I got an idea, and further investigation showed that this is indeed a oci problem. The required PHP version can't be started correctly, and that's why my pages can't connect to the DB, whereas sqlplus, sqldeveloper etc have no problem.

I had to "downgrade" the version of InstantClient (to 18.3) in order to work with Oracle 18c, and apparently that's when something got mixed up as I still have this:

php-oci8-19c.x86_64 7.4.28-1.0.1.el7

Then I installed InstantClient 19.14 in /opt/oracle/ using the *.zip files, as the .*rpm files from the repo conflicted with XE 18c. This worked, I could install the PECL OCI-8.

Changed some environment variables (because of the changed path) and now my OCI run fine, but I still get the TNS-error message the moment I try to connect via the vhost (everything else works).