Set environment variables

Setx - Set environment variables

Although this command, SETX, does not appear to work in XP SP2, there is a tidbit of useful info near the page end.

To add a machine variable to the environment, run the following as an admin from the command line:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" /v /d "some data"

Domino R8 Beta3 Install

Ok, so I wanted to try out the latest IBM Domino Server product, currently at Release 8, Beta 3. We have two R6.5 servers running on i86 Linux boxes and I would like to migrate up to R7 or R8. So, I needed a playground.

Since I am running a rather bully desktop PC, I thought I would just run CentOS 5 as a VMWare guest OS (with WinXP as the host) and install R8. Sounded rather simple, I thought.

1. Find an existing VM Player CentOS 5 image to play with.
   I don't have a current version copy of VM Workstation and have not tried the ESX Server yet either. Besides, a 5 CD download of CentOS 5 would not be so kind to the network. So I went looking for a VM appliance. Found a likely candidate at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/820. This was a 400Mb image posted by simon_b. Looked reasonable so I downloaded the file.
2. Executed the VM
3. logged in as root, passwd thoughtpolice
4. changed root passwd
5. Ran yum update to get latest packages.
6. Downloaded the Beta 3 tarball from IBM and extracted.
7. Created user and group
   groupadd domino
   useradd domino -g domino
8. Installed as root using the text interface
9. selected defaults except put data into /opt/lotus/data
10. at end, I chose to start manually.
11. Installed the Gnome desktop (37 of 43 pkgs):
    yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop Environment"
12. This was not sufficient to start X. So, I also installed the X Window System (21 of 28 pkgs):yum groupinstall "X Window System"
13. Now startx works as user domino
14. I attempted to start the server
    /opt/lotus/notes/bin/http httpsetup
15. However, this failed with some message about setting DISPLAY variable. Also, the setup log had an error about libstdc++.so.5 being missing.
16. installed java-1.4.2-gjc-compat-src package from the Java Development group
17. installed compat-libstdc++-296 and compat-libstdc++-33 from Legacy Software Development group
18. I attempted to start the server
    /opt/lotus/notes/bin/http httpsetup
19. Success!

Why?

Just because I can? Somewhat. However the better reason is just because I am getting too old to remember every little postit (tip o' the hat to the trademark holder) note that I have for tips and tricks in my daily administration of computers and networks.

Maybe this will give me a better record of what I did, how I did it and why!