How to best distribute TNSNAMES.ORA file to many clients?

Hi everyone, probably a sillie question here, but I'm fairly new to Oracle:

We're getting ready to implement an application to lots of end-users (> 200), and want to automate client software installation and configuration as much as possible. Some of the users already use Oracle, some will be brand new. Instead of having each end-user run SQL*Net Easy Configuration to set up or update their TNSNAMES.ORA file, I was hoping to distribute a "generic" TNSNAMES file that would include all possible SIDs any user could connect to.

My problem is that it seems that there's no way to generate a TNSNAMES file for each client workstation without going through SQL*Net Easy Config, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid having each end-user do. I get the familiar "failed to resolve service name", even though I know the prototype TNSNAMES file is syntactically correct. I've snooped around a bit, and come to the conclusion that maybe the TNSNAMES contents are compared with a \orant\network\cfg file, but all the doc I've read warns me (with bold type!) against hacking these files.

Has anyone experienced a similar scenario? I can't believe what I'm trying to do should be so difficult, but then again, I'm an idealist <g>. Many thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Dave Received on Fri Feb 07 1997 - 00:00:00 CST