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Domino V12 Installation

The following short instruction helps you to install HCL Domino V12 on your Linux box.
It will help you to perform all essential steps to be up and running.

Leveraging the Nash!Com Domino start script, Domino can be automatically started with an automatically installed systemd service.
The start script is around since the first Domino on Linux version and is provided by Daniel Nashed free of charge.
The start script allows you to start/stop the server and also provides options for configuration, logging, troubleshooting and maintenance.

There is also an automated one touch installation script available performing all the following installation steps for you.
The following describes all the manual steps the installation script would perform automatically for you.

A very fast way to install your Domino server would be the following installation script, which is now part of the start script repository.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nashcom/domino-startscript/main/install_domino.sh | bash -

Update Linux

First of all you should update your Linux server to the latest software level in your current major version. In contrast to Windows this is a very straightforward and fast operation.

The packet manager takes care of downloading and installing the latest software for you.

yum -y update

Depending which packages are updated you might want to reboot the machine once.

reboot

Install Linux software

Domino requires the following software installed.

  • The Domino installer uses Perl. The smallest package you can install are the perl-libs.
  • Domino comes with the “Notes System Diagnostics” (NSD) tool, which leverages the GNU debugger (gdb). It is used to annotate the call-stacks of your Domino server’s processes.
yum -y install gdb perl-libs tar

Install Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux repository

Some additonal software is not available in the standard package repository of RedHat Linux.
To be able to install additional software, you have to first install the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux repository (EPEL).

yum -y install epel-release

Install additional system tools 

yum -y install sysstat bind-utils net-tools

Install additional useful software

  • git
    Git is often used to download (clone) existing GitHub projects and is a conventient way to download and keep those projects in sync
  • jq
    JQ is the tool to work with JSON data. It is also used in many scripts.
  • ncdu
    To find out about your disk space is very useful. You can browse directories to see how much space is used in which directory
yum -y install jq git ncdu

Create notes appliction user

Domino installation requires the root user and all Dominio binaries are owned by the root to ensure the integrity of the Domino software.
At run-time Domino uses an unprivileged user, which owns all data files.

On Linux each other has a primary group it belongs to. So you should create a corresponding group along with the user.

The standard name and group used is notes:notes. It is strongly recommended to stay with the defaults provided. It simplifies your environment and ensures additional software installes seamless.

adduser notes -U

In case your user should login directly, you can set a password.

passwd notes

Create directory structure for Domino data

The only required directory is the data diretory. However in larger infrastructures separating the different parts of your Domino server data. Standardizing on the following structure similifies your deployment.

In larger environments all those directories would leverge a separate mount point.
For small environments a single /local mount point should be sufficient.

It is strongly recommended to have at least one separate file-system (mount point e.g. /local) separating data from your system data.
For a very small test server creating a separate file-system isn’t required.
You can always introduce additional file-systems leveraging mount-points for each of the directories later without changing the directoy structure.

  • translog Transaction log data should be always placed outside your data directory
  • daos In case DAOS is used it is also strongly recommended to place the DAOS repository also outside the data directory
mkdir -p /local/notesdata
mkdir -p /local/translog
mkdir -p /local/nif
mkdir -p /local/ft
mkdir -p /local/daos

Ensure the your Domino application user notes is the owner of all directories containing Domino data.

chown -R notes:notes /local

Download the Domino web kit from Flexnet

Domino as a commercial software package is currently only available via the HCL Flexnet software portal.
An account and an active subscription is required to download current Domino software.

Depending on the type of account (customer/partner) the software is listed in different sections.
Entry point for the download portal: https://hclsoftware.flexnetoperations.com

The following example uses Domino V12.0 Domino_12.0_Linux_English.tar.
Flexnet customer accounts allow you to search for software including the name of the download file.
The automated installer comes with a list of current software packages and points you to the right download file.

Create an directory and download the software

mkdir -p /local/software
cd /local/software

Extract the Domino server web kit

tar xf Domino_12.0_Linux_English.tar

Switch to the extracted directory

cd linux64

Install Domino with default options using silent install

Domino comes with a silent installation option. When installing a Domino server into the recommended standard directory structure with the standard user, a silent install will perform the installation for you.
The default settings are already setup in the silent installer configuration file.

Depending on your server server, the installation can take a couple of minutes.

./install -f responseFile/installer.properties -i silent

Set security limits

Domino is usually started leveraging a systemd services which sets security limits for the Domino server as part of the systemd script configuration.
The security limits below are used for manual operations when starting the server processes on command line (e.g. off-line maintenance with DBMT).

Increase the number of open files for your Domino server to at least 80000 adding the following lines to your /etc/security/limits.conf file:

notes  hard    nofile  80000
notes  soft    nofile  80000

Install Nash!Com Domino on Linux start script

The start script comes with an install script. After downloading and extracting the tar file, just run the install script.
the install script takes care of creating and updating the the start script.
By default existing configuration files are not updated. Only the script itself is updated.

Switch back to the software directory

cd /local/software

Download the latest version of the Domino Start script from the offical GitHub repository release page.

If you want to download the software directly to your Linux machine, Curl is a very conventient way to download software.

Example for Version 3.7.0

curl -sLO https://github.com/nashcom/domino-startscript/releases/download/v3.7.0/domino-startscript_v3.7.0.taz

Extact the downloaded tar file

tar -xf domino-startscript_v3.7.0.taz
cd domino-startscript

Run the start script installation script

./install_script

Firewall configuration

Linux comes with firewalld which should be enabled for all of your servers.
This section describes the steps to expose the TCP/IP ports used by Domino.

Create a new NRPC firewall rule

The Domino NRPC protocol is not listed among the well known application ports.
Instead of just specifying the port with it’s port number, you can add a XML file to define your service.
The start script already contains the XML file in the extra directory, which can be copied to your firewalld configuration.

cp /local/software/domino-startscript/extra/firewalld/nrpc.xml /etc/firewalld/services/

Open ports NRPC, HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP 

firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service={nrpc,http,https,smtp}

Reload the firewall configuration

firewall-cmd --reload

Check your exposed ports

Check your current configuration

firewall-cmd --list-services