Tomcat on Ubuntu Feisty

A while ago, I blogged about running OpenSSO on Tomcat in Ubuntu. I recently upgraded Ubuntu to 7.04 ‘Feisty Fawn’, which, while most things work great, seems to have caused some issues with Tomcat…

The first is this bug - when you start Tomcat, it just hangs. Apparently it’s to do with /var/lib/tomcat5.5/logs/catalina.out being a named pipe. The workaround that works for me is to add the following line (shown in bold) to the start block in /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5

$DAEMON -user "$TOMCAT5_USER" -cp "$JSVC_CLASSPATH" \
-outfile "$LOGFILE"  -errfile '&1' \
-pidfile "$CATALINA_PID" $JAVA_OPTS "$BOOTSTRAP_CLASS"
**cat /var/log/tomcat5.5/catalina.out > /dev/null &**
else
log_progress_msg "(already running)"
fi

The second issue is that Tomcat seems to have changed where it puts its web applications. They were in /usr/share/tomcat5.5/webapps; they are now in /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps. This breaks the security policy I blogged about last time - you now need to add the following to /etc/tomcat5.5/policy.d/50user.policy:

grant codeBase "file:${catalina.base}/webapps/openfm/-" {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

(i.e. switch from ${catalina.home} to ${catalina.base})

And before anyone asks “Why aren’t you using Glassfish?” - I am, I’m just using Tomcat as well, since a lot of the OpenSSO contributors use it. Their pain is my pain