Daniel Nashed's Blog

Running Domino in LXC containers on Proxmox requires a trick

Now that VMware might not be everyone's darling any more because of it's new mother ship, I took another look at Proxmox.
I know them for quite a while and they are doing a great job. I rebuilt a Intel NUC with 2 TB NVMe disk with the current version of Proxmox.

Proxmox supports full VMs and also LXC -- which is an interesting option for testing in lab environments.
You can setup a new Linux test machine in minutes from a template. And there are ready to use templates for all major Linux distributions.
I had a post long time ago about Proxmox automation on command-line.

LXC needs special settings during install

My first attempts installing Domino native and in a Docker container crashed and burned.

It turned out the UID/GID mapping for LXC didn't play nice with the high UID/GID the Domino webkits have.

Here is an example of the owner with names and UID/GIDs for the Domino webkit:

-rwxr-xr-x nightly/scnotes
-rwxr-xr-x 51714544/252601622  


When tar is started as root user, the original owner will be restored by default.
Usually this isn't a big deal. But it breaks the installation in a LXC container, if the UID/GID cannot be mapped (the default range is 65535).

See error messages at the end of the post.

Work around for the installer

The work-around is to untar the files with --no-same-owner option.

After the files are extracted with this trick, the InstallAnywhere installer still fails, because it extracts the installer run-time JVM in the same way.

But GNU tar provides a way to export a variable to add options to the tar command-line invocations.
This export does the trick to install Domino native and in a container image with Docker or Podman inside a LXC instance.


export TAR_OPTIONS=--no-same-owner


I have tested with Ubuntu LTS 22.04 and CentOS Stream LXC instances.
The change is already in the Domino Container GitHub repository in the develop branch (along with other functionality I am currently testing).


Proxmox might get more popular and is a great platform

I guess some of you will take a closer look into Proxmox soon. So this information might be helpful.
Proxmox offers a couple very nice details. Like you can specify a download URL for ISO image including checksum calculation.
The virtualization is KVM based using Linux kernel virtualization. And the Debian OS supports ZFS out of the box.

Proxmox also provides a backup server and also has native Ceph support.


Support Hint

You need to be a bit careful with LXC containers. Like with Docker containers the kernel is shared with the LXC instances.
The glibc is provided by the LXC instance. But the kernel is the host's 6.5 kernel, which is currently unsupported by Domino -- but works.

Specially for Linux based environments Proxmox is a great option!
If you want to play with it, you can also run it with embedded virtualization inside different hypervisor like VMware ESXi.

-- Daniel




For reference and searching. here are the error messages

Extracting the tar

tar -xvf Domino_14.0_Linux_English.tar
linux64/
linux64/tools/
linux64/tools/installLinux.bin
tar: linux64/tools/installLinux.bin: Cannot change ownership to uid 51714544, gid 252601622: Invalid argument
linux64/tools/removeFiles.txt
tar: linux64/tools/removeFiles.txt: Cannot change ownership to uid 51714544, gid 252601622: Invalid argument
linux64/tools/nui.cfg
tar: linux64/tools/nui.cfg: Cannot change ownership to uid 51714544, gid 252601622: Invalid argument


Running InstallAnywhere

/install

HCL Domino for Linux/Unix Install Program
 ----------------------------------------
Preparing to install
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
Unpacking the JRE...
The included VM could not be unarchived (TAR). Please try to download the installer again and make sure that you download using 'binary' mode. Please do not attempt to install this currently downloaded copy.

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