Quick Tip: locales are everything

Tuesday, November 29, 2022 at 6:06 PM UTC

This is just for my records because I will forget about that again - like today.

I wanted to temporarily test Domino 12.0.2 as a native installation, not Docker. The machine I had for this runs Ubuntu 22.04 - which is not supported of course, but I thought this was ok for a simple test.

My problem: neither One Touch nor remote setup for configuration was possible.

One touch

Obviously I had a problem in my JSON config file so the auto config reported an error:

AutoConfiguration error: 20:A0

Well, interesting... but not helpful.

Remote Server Setup Utility

My second attempt was obviously using the manual way with the tool. But this also failed with this little poem:

At least this one told me that there was something wrong with the language settings. I am old and I forget things but I remembered myself struggling with something like this before - and this has to do with the OS, esp. Ubuntu. The locales are not set properly by default for the server setup. Though the setup itself went through, it seems to make a difference. 

Solution

In this case I found a post describing this exact problem (in general not related to Domino) with Ubuntu:

Add these lines to the ~/.bashrc file

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Afterwards execute a source ~/.bashrc to make it work for you.

In general it's a good idea to also add these lines to /etc/profile

export LANG="en_US.utf8"
export LANGUAGE="en_US.utf8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.utf8"

Check if everything is set now with locale. You should at least see the LANG=en_US.UTF-8 line.

Run the Domino setup again. By the way: this also may fail on Ubuntu because of a different default shell. If you see this

./install
./install: 44: [: /local/software/linux64/tools/-E: unexpected operator
./install: 51: [: /local/software/linux64/tools/-e: unexpected operator
./install: 57: [: /local/software/linux64/tools/-e: unexpected operator
./install: 1: .: Illegal option -e

Then your system does not use bash as shell but maybe dash. To change that, run dpkg-reconfigure dash and answer the upcoming question with "no". This will switch back to bash and the install script will run. This last solution I found on Daniel's blog.

Finally remote server setup started normally but I decided to use One Touch - and then I could see the reason for the failure and fixed my JSON config Smile






Latest comments to this post

Daniel Nashed wrote on 30.11.2022, 11:39

Personally I am not a big fan of Ubuntu or Debian for Domino. But it meets the basic support requirements.
Still it is a bit different and needs special care.
You found the right post in my blog already -- which I already forgot. Do you know that blog some of those also to have a good reference to search afterwards? And others might run into similar issues and will find the error message, which I always add to make it easy to find :-)

In your case it looks like the installer did create a res/en_US.UTF-8 link instead of /res/C.
I still did not find out in which case the installer will create the language specific link. But the link is problematic!

What I always do when installing Domino and this is also valid for the container image:

- switch to the POSIX locale "C" before running the install
- Always create a symbolic link for all the main languages to avoid that the fallback to /res/C is needed.

The resource file mismatch is the number 1 question I get for my start script.
And it has it's own documentation --> https://nashcom.github.io/domino-startscript/startscript/known-issues/#hex-messages-instead-of-log-messages

Thanks for your great blog post to raise the awareness for this issue!

By the way I tested with Ubuntu and Debian as the base image of the Domino container.
But they introduced a change and the installer causes issues. And I don't see that we really have to support Domino on a Ubuntu or Debian container.

And for your it would be also easier to use the container image, than the native install.
But for the native install I would also have an automated script.

 

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