Starting Lotus Domino on Linux

This is one of those facts that I knew, and yet had forgotten - the primary reason that I blog is to write down what happened, so I don't forget it or, if I do forget it, to find it again :-)

Working with Lotus Domino 8.5.1 FP3 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, I was wondering why I was unable to start the server, or its constituent tasks: -

a) Log in as the Notes user ( idcuser in my case )
b) Change to the Notes data directory

    cd /local/notesdata

c) Execute the Domino task e.g. server, http etc.: -

/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/http

d) Get the message: -

/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/latest/linux/http: error while loading shared libraries: libhttpstack.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I was then directed to an existing startup script: -

/local/notesdata/DomShrct.sh

which contains precisely one line: -

su idcuser -c "cd /local/notesdata; /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server; "

Note that it executes the Domino binary from /opt/ibm/lotus/bin - exploring this further with: -

ls -al /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server

shows me that it's "merely" a symbolic link to another place: -

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Sep  2 20:37 /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/server -> /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/tools/startup

However, it works a treat, and I can use a similar syntax for other tasks: -

su idcuser -c "cd /local/notesdata; /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/http;"

su idcuser -c "cd /local/notesdata; /opt/ibm/lotus/bin/ldapsearch;"

etc.

Is that sweet, or what ?