TNS

The web-based Enterprise Manager doesn't do anything useful. The database is either up or down, it can't even decide. After some more dabbling i came to the conclusion that the mysterious thing called Network (Oracle's idea of it) is not configured properly on my computer. I presumed that the installer would do that automatically, but now i guess it didn't. It seems that neither the server (listener) nor the client are configured properly. I know that there are those notorious files called listener.ora and tnsnames.ora and that i'm supposed to edit them, but it just doesn't seem the logical thing to do in this "Self-Managing Database". No, i don't think that manually editing those files should be obvious to every DBA and developer from some magical source; the initial configuration should be done in the installation wizard.

I know that i can learn all this stuff the easy way, by asking friends, finding better books or doing a course. But i want to do it the hard way and possibly submit my experiences to Oracle.

And what, for God's sake, does the mysterious abbreviation TNS mean??