Installing Lotus Domino 8.5 on CentOS 5 in less than six hours.

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Installing Lotus Domino 8.5 on CentOS 5 in

less than six hours.
Posted by Lars Larsson on 2009-09-17 under Blog, ComputerGeek | 2 Comments to Read

A couple of days ago I got my self a server, a VPS from www.glesys.se. Since I mainly are going
to use my server for development and testing I figured that it would be a cheaper option for me to
go with a VPS instead of having a dedicated server or co-locate a server, especially since I don’t
need a high performance server. To cut cost even more, I choose to go with an “free” operating
system as opposed as going with the Microsoft Windows option (not only had that option had a
license cost but also I would have had to increase the amount of RAM and CPU on my VPS
further increasing the monthly cost of my server). Since I prefer Red Hat based distributions I
chose CentOS 5, which is a community based adaptation of Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server.

Said and done, I ordered my VPS, half an hour later I had my server up and running and full root
access to it via SSH. The serer only had the base system running, no unnecessary overhead, the
footprint of the base system were less then 10 mb of RAM! The first thing I did was to ensure that
my OS was up to date by running “> yum update” from the command line, this resulted in about
60 mbytes of updates which I installed. Then I went through this list from IBM, just to be sure that
the installation of the Domino server wouldn’t fail because of some stupid dependency. I used
yum to install most of the packages listed (“> yum install <package_name>”), some of them could
not be found in the default yum repositories, but I just skipped them.

After updating and making sure that the base system was stable I uploaded the tar-ball (that some
how got from IBM) containing the setup files for IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 for x86 Linux. This part
of the installation actually took the longest… Anyhoo, one in place on the server I unpacked it
using “tar xvf <filename>.tar”. Had a quick look in the directory structure it created and fond the
install script. No time to loose, I executed the install script and… It failed…

Setting up some logging for the install script revealed this error

file name: ibm_linux_142sr8.bin

ERROR: Invalid bundled JVM. Missing ‘jvm’ file.

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Some Google-minutes later I found this IBM article. After reading the article and checking the
mounting options for my “/tmp” file system I realized that indeed the “noexec” option were set.
Edited the “/etc/fstab” file and removed the mounting option and restarted the server. Once again,
tried to run the installer, presto! It works. Proceeded with the installation using the default values,
but once again it bangs out! This time because I forgot to create the user account, “notes”. A quick
“adduser notes”, “> nano /etc/groups” and “> nano /etc/passwd”, I had setup an account with the
name “notes”, belonging to a group called “notes”, a home directory of “/local/notesdata” and
with a UID/GID of 1352

So, third time the charm? Executed the install script once again and installed the server with all the
default options, success! After the server was installed I started the server in “listen” mode, so that
I could launch my remote setup utility to configure the server. This is simplest done by switching
user to the “notes” account using “> su notes”, switching to the home directory of the account
using “> cd ~”, then issuing the command “> /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server -listen”.

Once the Domino server is started in listening mode you can launch your remote setup tool and
point it to the Domio servers public address, given that the port is not blocked you will be able to
setup the server as if you were setting up a local server.

After I finished setting up the server wanted to test the Domino server, so, still from the command
line and logged in as the “notes” user, I issue “> /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server”. When doing this you
will run the Domino server in user mode and your shell will become the Domino console.
Everything started up fine, no problem at all. So I configured my Lotus Notes client and connected
to the server, downloading my “user.id” file from the directory and started to configure the
Domino directory.

Once done I realized that i would need a start up script so that my Domino server would start
automatically upon system start. I after I googled some terms like “Linux Domino Startup script” I
found this site, where I found some old scripts that I could use as a foundation for the script I
needed (since I am not a Linux shell scripting guru I thought that would be the simplest soulution
(-:). Once I had my script working as desired I had to install it as a system service. There is a nifty
command for this, “chkconfig“. If you have done everything that you need to do in the script,
placed it in the directory “/etc/inti.d/” and made it runnable (“> chmod 755 <scriptfile>”) then you
will be able to install it as a system service by issuing the command “> chkconfig –add
<scriptfile>”. The command will read your scriptfile to determine at which runlevels it should
start or stop at. It will automatically create symlinks in the appropriate runlevel directory (i.e.
“/etc/rc3.d/S30<scriptfile>”).

After I installed the script I rebooted my server and now it starts up at system boot. Nice, it also
stops nicely on system shutdown and I can also use the script to restart the service by manually
invoke the script by issuing “> /etc/init.d/<scriptfile> restart”.

Perhaps this posting will help someone struggling to install Domino on Linux, as I myself could
not find any single place to find all this information gathered my thought is that perhaps someone
will end up at this place and could benefit from the information that i collected here! If you would
like to have the script I could mail it to anyone who requests it! Also, if you want more
information of any of these steps, please drop me a line via email or post a comment here!

/Lars

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: Domino 8.5, Install, Linux, Lotus Domino, server, Work

• Fieryhail said,

http://www.computergeek.se/index.php/2009/09/17/installing-lotus-domino-8-5-on-ce... 29/03/2010
Installing Lotus Domino 8.5 on CentOS 5 in less than six hours. | ComputerGeek Page 3 of 5

Thanks for the post. I am currently running Domino 8.5.1 on a Windows Server 2003 R2
EE server and am having lots of issues, mainly due to the underlying Winblows
infrastructure. I had tried an install on CentOS 5 that didn’t go through properly. I look
forward to tryng it with this information. I’ll post results. Thanks again.

• Lars Larsson said,

Hi! I hope that it works out for you!

Please do post here if it worked out!
Nice to see that this information could be of use for someone!

/Lars Larsson

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