Lotus Notes and Domino on Red Hat 7
I’ve been wanting to try this for some time now, and today I decided to venture into the realm of installing Lotus Domino Server on a Linux Box. Today I decided to use a version of Domino I downloaded from notes.net as well as the Red Hat Linux 7.0 distribution. From all reports I’ve seen, this combination works.
Setup of Red Hat
Setting up Red Hat was quite easy, I popped in the CD-ROM, chose TEXT setup and told the installer that I was installing a server and away it went. I was also required to partition the drive and had no problems with that either. I gave the Red Hat computer an IP on my local network (192.168.0.3) that I knew was going to work OK. Red Hat was also able to detect and install the Network Card without problems. I then used the ftp utility to ftp to my server and download the Domino version I was to install. I extracted the files and started the installation.
Setting Up Domino
Starting the setup is easy. I was in the /tmp directory and after extracting the .tar file I was left with a Linux directory, in this directory there is a script name install. I ran the install script using ./install and the script started. The script was easy to understand and required I follow the prompts. I did make one mistake however, the setup required a user id on the system to use for itself. This is usually notes and so I had to exit the setup and create a user and group by the name of notes.
I ran the setup again and it completed the entire process without and error.
The details for the setup were as follows:
Installation type : Domino Server
Program directory : /opt/lotus
Data directory : /local/notesdata
UNIX user : notes
UNIX group : notes
the next step required that I log into the system as notes (this can also be done by using the command su notes) and then starting the http server (web server setup program). To start the web server program, you need to switch to the /local/notesdata directory using the cd command and then run the following:
/opt/lotus/bin/http httpsetup
This is supposed to run the web server that allows the remote user to configure the Domino server, but I instead go the following error. I had to stop and rethink the process.
/opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux/http: error while loading shared libraries: libsty
I decided that this may have been caused by an improper setup of the RedHat server. I will attempt to try installing Red Hat with all options selected next.
Second Time Around
On the second installation of Red Hat I decided to install the Workstation option and select many of the extras including KDE (X-Window) hoping that a module that was missing above was the reason for my errors.
After installing, ftp downloading the tar file and setting up notes I) was able to get it running! After running the /opt/lotus/bin/http httpsetup the server comes back with a window the says:
02/18/2000 10:49:35 AM Created new log file as
/local1/6.0_0218_Ent_dom/lotus/notesdata/log.nsf
02/18/2000 10:49:35 AM
*****************************************
* Lotus Domino Server Setup *
* To setup this server, please connect *
* your web browser to port 8081 *
* Example: http://this.server.com:8081 *
*****************************************
02/18/2000 10:49:36 AM JVM: Java Virtual Machine initialized.
02/18/2000 10:49:38 AM HTTP Web Server started
I then went to another computer on the same network (Running Windows 98) and connected to the http://192.168.0.3:8081/ URL. What then comes up is the Domino Web Setup document and we’re off to the races!
After going through the web-based setup and creating a new server, I exited and started the server using the /opt/lotus/bin/server command. After a few minutes, the server was up and running and I could connect to the home page http://192.168.0.3.
Lotus Domino and Linux is a very powerful combination and seems to be gaining some real momentum in the server market. These tools are freely available as a demo or even full-blown server if your up to the task of getting it to work.
I have not tried to move an existing Notes server from one platform to another. Has anyone tried this and be willing to share their experiences?
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