First the network install seemed like a better idea than downloading the 5GB DVD ISOs, but when you first start it up, it gives you a blank network URL for package downloads. So you end up googling for it until you find this:
  32 bit: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/i386/
 64 bit: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/
No one uses 32-bit any more, so I'm not sure why they bother with it.
Next thing to hit that's different from Centos 5 is that the installer doesn't give you a choice to select packages, so you just get a command line prompt which is fine for a server. At this point, you'll have a VM of roughly 2GB.
First, you have to set up the networking interface in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. For some reason, it's not automatically set to be enabled on bootup or to use DHCP, so make sure this file includes:
  ONBOOT=yes
 BOOTPROTO=dhcp
If you need a static IP, you can use this instead:
  ONBOOT=yes
 BOOTPROTO=none
 BROADCAST=10.0.1.255
 NETWORK=10.0.1.0
 NETMASK=255.255.255.0
 IPADDR=10.0.1.27
Now you can finally do a "yum update" to update to the latest version of all packages installed.
Note that yum also only looks at the first line in /etc/resolve.conf to resolv names (why it doesn't use the normal name resolution seems stupid). The symptom you'll see is that you can ping any system on the Internet so your network connection is up, but doing a yum update gives errors like "PYCURL ERROR 6 - Couldn't resolve host" and "Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo". Dumb Dumb Dumb...no clue why they did it that way :-P

Add the EPEL repo (for shorewall):
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
And the RPMForge repo (dkms which is used by VirtualBox):
rpm -Uvh http://packages.sw.be//rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.epm

To install VirtualBox additions, you need to install gcc, kernel-devel, and dkms and then reboot (the reboot is needed to get the KERN_DIR environment variable set properly):
  yum install gcc kernel-devel dkms perl
  yum update kernel*
  reboot
Now you can mount the CD and install Virtualbox additions:
  mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
  cd /mnt
  sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.sh
If it complains that it can't find your kernel headers, you might have to do this first
  KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`
  export KERN_DIR

To install Domino (note: this is no longer needed w/ Domino 9.0...only 8.x), you have to install a bunch of ancient libraries that the Domino installer depends on by doing:
  yum --skip-broken install glibc-2.12-1.7.el6.i686 libgcc-4.4.4-13.el6.i686 libstdc++-4.4.4-13.el6.i686
Add a notes user and notes group first:
  groupadd notes
  useradd -g notes notes
If you're going to install Notes from a VirtualBox shared folder, add the vboxsf group to the notes user:
  usermod -G notes,vboxsf notes

Untar domino854_linux_cd5_prod.tar (or whatever the name is now) into a temporary directory and then run "./install -is:log mylog.txt" (if you see "Invalid bundled JVM. Missing 'jvm' file" in this file, it means the installer can't execute from your directory (usually this happens if you unpack the tarball into /tmp).

Create a link to /opt/lotus if you prefer getting to Domino there instead of via /opt/ibm/lotus
  ln -s /opt/ibm/lotus /opt/lotus

Change the file descriptor limit or you'll get warned every time Domino starts up. Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add these two lines:
  notes soft nofile 20000
  notes hard nofile 49152

Centos installs a default iptables firewall which will block Domino remote setup, so you have to disable it first:
iptables -F

Since we only have command line access, we'll now have to do remote server setup. Switch to the Notes user and fire up the server in the data directory
  su notes
  cd /local/notesdata
  /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server -listen
and on your Notes client, run serversetup as usual to set up the Domino server
  serversetup -remote
Once set up, on the Domino server, you can start it up to make sure things are ok as the Linux notes user....let it run for a bit until it settles down:
  cd /local/notesdata
  /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server
Quit out of Domino server and unpack Traveler into a directory. You can't use the GUI install, so you'll need to edit the installer.properties file. Make sure that DOMINO_DATA_DIRECTORY_1 and DOMINO_NOTESINI_DIRECTORY_1 point to your data directory. Also make sure LINUX_USER_NAME and LINUX_GROUP_NAME are uncommented and are correct. After that, run silent install with:
  ./silentInstall
It'll probably fail and you'll have to look at your InstallerError.log file in which you'll see this:
Unable to verify username and groupname.
Linux user name: 1
Running it as the notes user instead of root will put this error in the file:
Caution: It is recommended that the install application be run as the root user.
FWIW, I've also tried installing w/ the GUI installer by installing X-Windows with no luck, but even if it did, a command line install should always be available for a Linux server :-P

========================
Next you should secure your system.
Install shorewall (and set it up as you wish):
  yum install shorewall
Set up ssh to only allow you access to the system by setting up a .ssh directory in your home directory. Move ssh off the standard port.
========================
And if you're using a VM for this, activate the noop disk scheduler so Linux tries to re-order disk writes for speed:
Manual testing:
echo noop > /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler
If you want to permanently change the scheduler for all block devices you can set it as a boot option.
Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and enter in kernel line elevator=noop.

1. Ken02/10/2012 14:01:20

Ubuntu/Debian isn't officially supported by Lotus.
RHEL and SUSE are, so it's usually a safe thing to install Domino on their open source equivalents...CentOS and OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE is more of a desktop distro. Centos closely tracks RHEL and is more of a stable server distro.

And FWIW, I also have a Debian server running Domino 8.5.3...wasn't hard to do either, but the same UI issues w/ the Traveler installer remain

2. Jorge Molina02/10/2012 07:03:54

Meh, why centos? I switched to ubuntu server LTS couple of years ago and I never looked back. I try to avoid rpm management at all costs. I'm addicted to aptitude now :)

3. ben08/17/2011 15:15:25

thank you!!

yum --skip-broken install glibc-2.12-1.7.el6.i686 libgcc-4.4.4-13.el6.i686 libstdc++-4.4.4-13.el6.i686

allowed to get it installed

4. Morten Clausen 08/10/2011 13:05:00

Erm... a few of us are still using 32 bit on e.g. old hardware running a bunch of servers on VMWare for a small group of coders in a small, poor company.

But that aside - this is a great post. It helped a lot. Thanks!