Problems with Tomcat due to Debian?

[abenstex]

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new to the whole Tomcat thing, but nevertheless i have to install a webapp under Debian 3.1 with Tomcat 4.1 running. Unfortunately i am having some problems that I don't know how to solve.

1: unfortunately i keep getting the following error:

Servlet /tomcat-docs threw load() exception
javax.servlet.ServletException: Service not available (propertyFile not loadable:Can't find properties file /usr/share/tomcat4/webapps/tomcat-docs/../webapps/ROOT/conex/WEB-INF/properties/cp.xml


What annoys me about it is that the file cp.xml exists in the directory /webapps/ROOT/conex/WEB-INF/properties. From what i get from the above error output is that Tomcat is looking for the file under /tomcat4/webapps/webapps/ROOT/conex/properties. How does this happen and how can I change this? Does it depend on the source code, the tomcat configuration or the OS (Debian)?

2. Actually I know that webapps should not be installed under the ROOT directory but in the webapps directory instead. Therefore, as far as i know, I would have to add a virtual context to the server.xml file in the conf/ folder. So I tried to change this and added the following to the server.xml file:

         <Context path="/conex" docbase="/usr/share/tomcat4/webapps/conex" debug="0" reloadable="true" />

But after doing that the server did not want to start anymore. Another <Context> element, which is Debian dependent, is:

<Context path="/tomcat-docs" docBase="tomcat-docs" debug="0">
            <Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext"
                       allowLinking="true" />
         </Context>

Could it be that this interferes with my changes? Or are my changes completely wrong in the first place?

I appreciate any help/advive...

 

[sedj]

Tomcat is written in Java - which is platform independant - there is no "Debian" only config for Tomcat.

I would change your "conex" webapp Context entry to this for starters :

<Context path="/conex" docbase="/usr/share/tomcat4/webapps" debug="0" reloadable="true" />

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[abenstex]

Well, i changed the context attribute as you said, but it didn't help at all. Tomcat still does not want to start after the change

 

[abenstex]

And besides I still believe that there are some Debian specific issues otherwise there wouldn't be these lines by default in the server.xml:

<!-- Allow symlinks for the tomcat-docs webapp. This is required in the Debian packages to make the Servlet/JSP API docs work. -->
<Context path="/tomcat-docs" docBase="tomcat-docs" debug="0">
<Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext"
allowLinking="true" />
</Context>