So IBM Lotus Domino 8 has been out for
a few days now and lately I’ve been thinking about replacing the OS on
my server with a Linux Distro and moving away from Windows 2003 Server.
With this in mind I loaded up a few virtual machines with different distro’s
and tried loading up the Domino server.
I tried OpenSUSE,SLES, RHEL5, CentOS5,
Fedora 8 and Ubuntu. Except Ubuntu all of these distros have reached DVD
size so make sure you have a good internet connection to download them,
I think downloading probably took up most of my testing time.
After you have installed your selected
distro make sure you apply all the updates, nearly each distro required
about 300Mb worth of updates. Then make sure you remove any smtp or web
servers that may have been installed as part of the base installation.
I found that most distro’s installed either Sendmail or Postfix which will
tie up the smtp port unless they are stopped.
Before starting the install make sure
you ‘su’ into the root account. On Ubuntu you’ll need to setup a root password
using the ‘sudo passwd’ command. I’d also advise running a ‘xhosts +local:’
command before running ‘su’ so that you can run in graphical mode install.
In truth I could only get the graphical
mode installer working in OpenSuse and SLES, no matter what I did I could
not get get it working in any of the other distros.
I did find that the installer does not
set the rights correctly on the installed files when testing on OpenSUSE.
Everything is owned by root so you need to reset them to be owned by your
‘notes’ user and group except for two files called ‘BindSock’ and ‘TuneKrnl’
which will need a special bit set so they continue to run as root.
After the install you can copy over
files from your old windows install of Domino, just make sure your set
the rights correctly on the files, then you can start up the server and
you should see your domino server console. A quick search of the web will
net you an autostart script which might need some tuning for your selected
distro. I’d recommend that you run the server in Java Console mode so you
can interact with it better.
Remember on RHEL and SLES are certified
by IBM for running your Domino server so while it will work in other distro’s
it won’t be supported.
Dec's Dom Blog 
Dec,Thanks for the great post!! Any inforation on installing Domino8 on linux is appreciated.Do you have a preferred distribution of the free(unsupported) ones?Also can you be a bit more specific on what you do with the Bindsock and tunekerl files? I’m a linux novice..
LikeLike
I don’t think I have decided on a distro yet but I am leaning towards OpenSUSE or Ubuntu.To fix the possible issues on with Bindsock and TuneKrnl just issue the following commands :chown root:notes /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80000/linux/bindsockchmod 4550 /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80000/linux/bindsockchown root:notes /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80000/linux/tunekrnlchmod 4550 /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/80000/linux/tunekrnlHope this helps.
LikeLike
Hi,I’m not sure if i got you right. But under Unix systems all program files (e.g. /opt/…) are owned by root:root and it is good that it is that way.The normal notes uses only owns the files in the “data” folder.The normal notes user cans start ans stop the server but not change the binary files. What is what you normally want.You can find a good introduction to all that including start/stop scrips in that redbook => { Link }(Yes it is for R6, but still valid expect that the installer is now a different one)
LikeLike