Scenario : Setting up a physical standby from Exadata to a non-Exadata single instance. tnsping from standby to primary works fine but tnsping from primary to standby fails with:

TNS-12543: TNS:destination host unreachable

I am able to ssh standby from primary, can ping as well but tnsping doesn’t work.  From the error description we can figure out that something is blocking the access. In this case it was iptables that was enabled on the standby server.

Stopping the service resolved the issue.

service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off

The error is an obvious one but sometimes it just doesn’t strike you that it could be something simple like that.