keithstric.com::Lotus Domino 8.0 on SuSE Linux 11

Open Source: A Silver Lining in the Economic SlumpHomeInitial Notes 8.0.1 impressions

This weekend I installed Lotus Domino 8.0 on Open SuSE Linux 11. The install process went pretty flawlessly and no errors were encountered until I went to start the Domino Server, with the exception of a warning that SuSE 11 isn't supported, but I'll get to that in a second. My Linux box is a basic computer with a Pentium celeron processor running at 1.8 GHZ with 700 MB RAM and 3 disk drives totalling about 350 GB. This server is serving the roles of the home Lotus Domino server for documentation storage, testing, etc. It's also a web server running Apache for setting up and testing some of my customer's test sites and also a file server running Samba. All of this is behind my firewall and not accessible from the outside.

I've been without a test environment for quite some time now and I must say I'm happy to have it back. The internals of this server had been sitting under my desk forever, running but not really serving a purpose. It also just had 35GB of disk space that wasn't allocated very well so was pretty much useless. Now I had all the hardware from my old server that this website used to run on also sitting underneath my desk, but the processor fan stopped working on it and it basically overheated something on the board and/or the processors. So, I just took the best hardware from each machine and combined them into one. This was pretty painless with the exception of finding graphics drivers for the ATI graphics card that wouldn't lock up the machine. But I got to thinking that I really don't need a GUI so I just start the box at runlevel 3 which prevents it from loading X and gnome. So far I'm happy with the setup.

Now, even though I did receive a warning that SuSE 11 wasn't supported I proceeded along anyway. The setup routine ran flawlessly with no errors. I did a custom installation of Domino as since this is a stand alone server and I'm pretty much the only user I didn't need scheduler, replication, smtp and all that stuff (but we may revist SMTP for sending mail) so none of that was enabled. I also chose Remote Server as the configuration option and used the Remote Server Setup program from my Windows box, especially since the GUI was giving me issues. Once the installation was completed the listener service for the Remote Server Setup client started without hitch. I connected and setup the server to my liking. Once completed, the listener service stopped and I then attempted to start the Domino server. This is where I ran into issues. I tried starting the server from the notesdata directory with a command line like "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80010/linux/server", this immediately produced an error. The error was complaining that libnotes.so couldn't be found. I verified that libnotes.so was indeed present and that the permissions were properly assigned (root.root 755). So, I started searching the web. I didn't really get very far as I found a lot of people complaining about the error but no real solutions as how to fix it. After reading this post on Declan 's site I wandered around following links and found that I was using the wrong path to start the server So, to make a long story a little bit longer to start the server you should be running this command from within the notesdata directory "/opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server" this will start the server without the libnotes.so error. Hopefully this little gem of information will save someone some hair pulling.

Once I figured that out, things went pretty quickly. No problems were encountered and everything is now running as it should. I moved everything off of my windows box where I had Domino 8.0 beta 3 running onto the new linux box and I also moved all of my working files, icons, installations, etc. It's so nice to have a working, non-jerri-rigged test server again. I didn't realize just how handy a test server is until I did without one for awhile.

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Comments (2):

Vladimir Kocjancic

Re: Lotus Domino 8.0 on SuSE Linux 11
On: December 09, 2008 01:46 AM

I had similar difficulties, when installing Domino 8 on CentOS 5.2 instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What I did, I changed /etc/redhat-release file to resemble Red Hat Enterprise Linux edition and installed a libstdc++.so.5 (with CentOS 5, you get libstdc++.so.6) and everything worked fine.
If you need a start-up script, I've got a working one here ({ Link } ). It is written for Red Hat, so it will need some tweaking.

Keith Strickland

1 Re: Lotus Domino 8.0 on SuSE Linux 11
On: December 12, 2008 09:22 AM

Thanks Vladimir. I actually used the one from the "Lotus Domino 6 for Linux" redbook. Here is start-up script, guess I probably should have posted this above:


#!/bin/sh
#
# domino Start/stop the Lotus Domino server
#
# chkconfig: 345 01 95
# Description: This script is used to start and stop the domino \
#  server as a background process. It will send \
#  the serverID password from a file to the server.\
#  Communication with the server has to be done through \
#  console, Notes Administrator or webadmin.\
#
# Usage: /etc/rc.d/init.d/domino start|stop|restart|condrestart
#
# process name: server, ...
#
# Version 1.1, by LB, 2205-01-07

# Change the USER, GROUP, DATA_DIR and BIN_DIR for your server
DOMINO_USER="notes"
DOMINO_GROUP="notes"
DOMINO_DATA_DIR="/opt/ibm/notesdata"
DOMINO_BIN_DIR="/opt/ibm/lotus/bin"
LOCKFILE="/var/lock/subsys/domino"

export ODBCINI="/etc/odbc.ini"

# We need a file to put the serverID password in.
# Make sure the owner is the Domino owner and the file
# permissions are set to 400

SERVER_PASSWD_FILE="/opt/ibm/notesdata/.domino.pwd"

# See if the user that runs this script is root

if [ `id -u` != 0 ]; then 
  echo "This script must be run by root only"
  exit 1
fi

start() {
# First, check if the password file exists,
# and if not, exit with an errorcode
#    if [ ! -f $SERVER_PASSWD_FILE ] ; then
#      echo "Error: no password file."
#      exit 1
#    fi

# Set permission to 400 (read-only-owner)
# and ownership to $DOMINO_USER. These next lines are
# not necessary if the ownership was set correctly the first time.

    chmod 400 $SERVER_PASSWD_FILE
    chown $DOMINO_USER.$DOMINO_GROUP $SERVER_PASSWD_FILE

# Check we're not already running

    if [ -f $LOCKFILE ] ; then
      echo "Domino server apparently already running."
      exit 1
    fi

# Two ways to run the server (comment one of them out)
# 1. With the output of the console redirected to /var/log/domino.log
# Be sure to change the logrotate daemon.
# 2. With the output of the console redirected to /dev/null

    echo -n "Starting domino server..."

# Version with logfile
    su - ${DOMINO_USER} -c "cd ${DOMINO_DATA_DIR};\
      cat ${SERVER_PASSWD_FILE} | ${DOMINO_BIN_DIR}/server" \
      >> /var/log/domino 2>&1 &
    RETVAL=$?
    if [ "$RETVAL" = "0" ] ; then
      touch $LOCKFILE > /dev/null 2>&1
    fi
# Version without logfile
#    su - ${DOMINO_USER} -c "cd ${DOMINO_DATA_DIR};\
#      cat ${SERVER_PASSWD_FILE} |\
#      ${DOMINO_BIN_DIR}/server" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

    echo "done."
}

stop() {
    echo -n "Stopping Domino server. "
    su - ${DOMINO_USER} -c "cd ${DOMINO_DATA_DIR}; ${DOMINO_BIN_DIR}/server -q"
    RETVAL=$?
# RETVAL is 38 on normal shutdown - what does *that* mean?
# Users should test this on their own systems . . .
    if [ $RETVAL -lt 50 ] ; then
      rm $LOCKFILE
    fi
}

restart() {
 stop
 start
}

# See how we were called.

case $1 in
  start)
 start
 ;;
  stop)
 stop
 ;;
  restart)
 stop
 start
 ;;
  condrestart)
 [ -f $LOCKFILE ] && restart
 ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: domino {start|stop|restart|condrestart}"
    exit 1
    ;;

esac

# End of the domino script
exit 0

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