Domino 8 on Linux
Thursday, August 23, 2007 8:01 PM
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.