We had a lot of questions during our January webinar on Docker, to the point that we ran out of time to get to them all during the webinar. The following is a list of all of the questions and their answers. Again we thank Thomas and Daniel for their time during the webinar and to follow up with the answers.

Q With Red Hat doing away with CentOS8 will there be a specific install for Domino on Docker using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Related: What is the status on the future of CentOS, and how might that affect future Domino Linux deployments?
A No need to panic. Centos Stream 8 is a stable enterprise operating system. Today only RHEL, SLES and CentOS 7/8 are supported. HCL plans to broaden Linux support with basic support for just any Linux distributions that meet certain requirements (e.g., kernel, glibc and libstdc++, …) CentOS Stream is just one dot release away from RHEL, so it is likely to meet those requirements. We don’t see any reason why customers should panic all of a sudden.
Q Is it possible to connect several domino containers to the only one data volume so if one domino docker container crashes the other domino docker container continues to operate the data?
A If a container crashes, you just initiate a new container with the same data. If you want high availability, you should use Domino clustering. K8s is not a replacement for Domino clustering! For clustering you have two separate servers with two data directories running in two different pods
Q How do you configure the Docker for Mac network?
A Networking on Window, Linux and Mac works similar. It is hard to tell what specific networking issue you are running into. Networking on Docker can be quite tricky. As a first step check: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/networking/

If you are not getting your issue resolved, ping us with detailed information about your issue.
Q Does Docker MacOS support the Mac M1 chip ?
A Not released yet but a preview: Apple M1 Tech Preview: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/
Q Can Docker on Windows be used with WSL 1 (Windows Subsystem for Linux)?
A We do not recommend using WSL1. You should upgrade to WSL2 !
Q Can we migrate existing servers to Docker or we have to use Docker for only new servers?
A Yes, you move existing servers into a Docker container. It is as simple as copying the data directory from one server to another.

Recommendation: use a native volume pointing to like /local/docker/domino

You can access this directory from the Docker host and copy data before the server starts.

When an existing data directory (with a server.id file) is found, the Domino server setup routine is skipped, and the server will just start.

The Domino Docker community image runs a script at start up that will update your data directory automatically to the new templates
Q Can we configure Internet Sites? (SNI + different hostname or subdomain) using Daniel’s Domino on Docker script?
A The Docker Container script only manages the server. The logic we have is in the Docker Domino project in the config.json file. You can have a look into the volt configuration file we added and which I used in the demo as a good example how to create documents. However, it’s some work to put all the fields into those documents. But it is possible today.
Q Is there any documentation for using a Domino server with Docker on a QNAP NAS?
A No, but let’s create one :-) It is as simple as uploading the image directly to QNAP Containerstation using the “Create” menu. Building the image has to be done on a different computer or just use the official HCL Docker image which is already pre-built. When using a host mount point, make sure permissions for the directory/volume allow the userID in the container to access the filesystem outside of the container.
Q In the first part of the config.json file there are parameters of notes.ini and in the second one there are database parameters. What is the role for that parameter - database? It is only for custom made templates or also for system ones? Can you get deeper into this topic and explain the database parameter?
A It allows to create new or modify existing databases, incl. ACL’s, database properties, and all documents within. The main idea behind this is to fully automate the entire Domino configuration. For details see this: https://github.com/IBM/domino-docker/blob/master/docs/configjson.md
Q We have Debian as our default server OS. Why is HCL not supporting Debian by default? Of course we were still able to install and configure Domino and Sametime but had to tweak certain settings like for lnsnmp issues or chatdb loading issues for Sametime. We are now running our production Domino and Sametime servers on Debian 10 busters without issues but as said with little tweaking.
A Linux is not all the same. You can’t expect that software companies can support all flavors. HCL cannot test all combinations and has to focus on some distributions. Many components are the same in all the different Linux flavors but there are also a number of differences on top of the kernel and lib versions!

However, for Domino V12 there will be a more open approach for running on other Linux distributions. HCL is providing the bare minimum specifications of what a Linux distribution has to provide, e.g. kernel version, etc. to provide basic support for other Linux platforms.

The Domino community is then requested to document the steps to make Domino work on this distribution. If you would like to contribute your lessons learned for Debian, please reach out to Product Management (Thomas Hampel)
Q Should we consider Domino Docker container as one life left player? Once it crashed. We do not need NSD. We just launch another container based on the same domino docker image and env.settings?
A You want NSD to run and collect diagnostic data for every crash! And the Domino Docker container is designed to run NSD and try to restart the server. The Domino Docker community image also contains health scripts which detect if a container has crashed. On Kubernetes this can be used to trigger a restart in a new pod. However, the root cause of the crash should be analyzed.
Q About data volume, can it be pointing to any cloud storage provider?
A Yes and No. Domino is not supposed to share a Data directory with another server, however you can use the new DAOS Tier2 Storage option to use an S3 compatible storage provider for offloading your attachments to a low-cost storage.
Q Can you please share the url where you had provided the example for migrating old server to a Docker.
A Just create a new volume or point to a local directory. Copy the data directory and make sure the directory has the right owner and permissions set.

Docker by default uses user:group 1000:1000. The same user id needs to own the files on the host.
Q Are there special steps to take to add a new server using docker in the domino network? For example, creation of NAB etc. for the second server etc.
A Same as for any additional server in your Domino environment. First register a new server and copy the server.id into the new container. When using the Domino Docker community image, this can be done using the local file location (docker secret) or by pointing to remote HTTPS location where the new container will download the server.id from at start-up.

An example for the 2nd server setup with parameters can be found here https://github.com/IBM/domino-docker/blob/develop/examples/docker-compose/2nd-server.yml


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