Domino on Linux/Unix, Troubleshooting, Best Practices, Tips and more ...

 
alt

Daniel Nashed

 

Domino 11.0.0 on Linux Command or option is ambiguous

Daniel Nashed  8 January 2020 14:13:09


We ran into this during an update and I thought this was just me. But I got a mail from a partner today with the same issue.

I would really recommend installing Domino 11 into a new binary directory and switch the path to the new default /opt/hcl/domino.
But in case you cannot do that, you might run into an issue, because of you locale.
I blogged about "res" files before and they have a separate "known issue" section in my start script.

On Windows the string resources are part of the binaries. On Linux and UNIX in general Domino uses string resources as separate files.
This is an abstraction layer for translation. And in earlier times Domino had string resources for different languages.
Today we only have English res files and also the Windows servers are just having English.

But the res files are still around on Linux and can cause issues.

In this case on Domino 11.0.0 when res files are installed into different directories, it could happen that you see wrong messages on the server and it happened that the server console does not accept any commands:


[006527:000010-00007FE24B326700] Command or option is ambiguous



When you install into the new default location
/opt/hcl/domino you will not run into this.
But if you are updating your server the res files might get confused.
Below is an example how the res file directories look like.

Depending on the language of your installation you might have a different directory name for the res files.
Either the POSIX locale (default) C is used.

Or you have a directory in your language for example en_US.UTF-8. This is usually the locale which the root user used during installation!
Your Notes user could have a different locale, so in some cases you don't see messages but hex strings on the console.

In our new case something else has happened. There are two directories and the server us using the old directory on startup.
C is the fallback locale if your locale has no corresponding directory name.

My personal best practice is to use the POSIX locale for installation to get res files installed into the "C" directory.
And I create a sym-link for the other locales which I might need:

/opt/ibm/domino/notes/latest/linux/res/


drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 20. Dez 16:24 C

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    1 20. Dez 16:35 de_DE.UTF-8 -> C

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    1 20. Dez 16:35 en_US.UTF-8 -> C



This also avoids, that the installer updates files in a different directory, than what is used later on by your server.

In any case, if you run into it, just check the date of the file and correct the directories accordingly.

-- Daniel

Links

    Archives


    • [HCL Domino]
    • [Domino on Linux]
    • [Nash!Com]
    • [Daniel Nashed]