Why do all background processes have listening TCP ports?

I'm very new to Oracle, so excuse me if this stuff is obvious. I just couldn't find any information anywhere....

The background Oracle processes (ora_pmon, ora_lgwr, ora_ckpt, etc..) all have open listening TCP ports, what's the reason for this? I presume they all need to communicate with each other, or accept connections from some tools?

Security: it looks like these ports are vulnerable to attacks... is there a way to make the processes listen only on the 127.0.0.1 interface or is there any other configuration possible to make the processes unreachable from other hosts? If I'm right, only the listener process (tnslsnr) needs to be remotely accessible.

Any explanations or pointers to docs
would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Martin Received on Thu Aug 05 1999 - 16:12:18 CDT