Sunday, 37°C and a move to a renitent Domino server

Sunday, June 30, 2019 at 5:43 PM UTC

Time was up to update my LE certificate for the Domino web server. Unfortunately Letsencrypt needs a more modern OS than I had to offer, even when trying to do it manually and without LE4D. I already had a Domino V10 installed on another host with CentOS, so I just had to change DNS entries and also some internet sites.

Those were causing the first trouble for me: they weren’t doing anything except for the main one that controls the subdomains for this site and the two other basic domains (notesx.net and www.notesx.net). For those I am using the SSL certificates. Though the cert also contains two other subdomains I wasn’t able to use those internet site documents to control a redirect to a different database - other than that for the default domains.

What I didn’t know: SSL can only be activated for a single internet site (https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21173919). This by the way also has to contain the IP address of the machine to work properly, otherwise you will get „no website found for IP address [x.x.x.x]“ on the console and no website will popup.

The solution is simple but still a bummer: remove the kyr file name from all the other internet sites except from the one you want to use SSL with. Then all the other internet sites will start to work again - without SSL of course. As long as you request a https URL from the machine (regardless of the subdomain) you will end up using the SSL enabled configuration - and the redirection target. You are actually looking at the updated server right now, and it will be updated automatically by LE4D now.

The second problem was installing the Fixpack 2 for V10. I always had trouble with FP since FP8 on Domino 9 but this error was also new to me.

When starting the install process and answering all the questions, the final procedure stopped with this message:

Couldn’t find strings.res in /opt/ibm/domino - will attempt to use default
Not checking patches for linux.
Died at (eval 31) line 640.
/tmp/linux64/domino/tools/lib/NIC.pm line 772
The installation cannot proceed for the local host.

The reason is simple yet not really well documented. A first quick search didn’t bring anything useful. Finally Per Lausten gave me the right link to look for (he was also helpful with the first issue).

The language resource strings on Linux are located in /opt/ibm/domino/notes/latest/linux/res/C if you use the default paths. When this error occurs you seem to have a different LANG environment variable set other than to en_US.UTF-8. In my case (which I also didn’t know) mine was set to de_DE.UTF-8. Cou can check this by typing

echo $LANG

in your bash. So you could either change that or just do a stupid copy action for all those files located in the C folder to a new subfolder with that locale:

cd /opt/ibm/domino/notes/latest/linux/res/C
mkdir de_DE
cp /opt/ibm/domino/notes/latest/linux/res/C/* /opt/ibm/domino/notes/latest/linux/res/C/de_DE

or alternatively create a symlink to that directory from the original one. This should solve the problem. https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ndseforum.nsf/xpTopicThread.xsp?documentId=99C855AB35702A9885257D4D0033B036

In my case I just commented out the line 772 as it only changed directory otherwise let the script die.

So thanks again, Per for curing my pain on this hot summer Sunday! Cool






Latest comments to this post

Oliver Regelmann wrote on 01.07.2019, 05:51

I think you can solve #1 by using different IP addresses for each internet site.

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