Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Paul Breniuc wrote a nice Windows GUI tool to locate Oracle databases based on the perl script tnscmd.pl and released it quite some time ago. After a while he removed it from his website and it was not available. I get emails from time to time asking me if I know where it can be got. Tonight whilst surfing I found a site hosting it again. WinSID is available for now, I don't know if the original author will object and ask for it to be taken down but the license says it can be freely redistributed.

This great Oracle instance discovery tool. The tool does not need an Oracle client and is not a wrapper on top of the Oracle client. It can be used to interrogate the Oracle listener to display information about remote (and local) listeners - For instance services, SID, listener statistics on established connections. The link above points to Paul's main page for this tool and it gives some details of the tool and also some graphics of it in use. A great feature is the fact that a working TNSNAMES.ORA connection string is stored in the Windows clipboard. As I said the tool does not use Oracle libraries / OCI etc. It used native network code to send packets to the listener. The free version does not support all listener commands, the Pro version does. The free version does not support TNSPings, Paul was going to release a free ping tool, but this never happened.

I have updated my Oracle Security Tools page to update the new link.