Bryan, thanks for your advise. With your guidance and some further reading how to deploy apps under Tomcat I finally managed to get this running.
As a short summary: 1) Deploying the war file into tomcat using the tomcat manager application placed the war file 'derby.war' into tomcat's webapps folder (/var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps/ on my debian system) and also created a folder within webapps called 'derby'. Initially the derby folder created only contained one subfolder 'WEB-INF' in which only one file 'web.xml' was found. 2) Within the WEB-INF folder I then manually created an additional folder 'lib' into which I placed 'derby.jar', 'derbynet.jar' and 'derbytools.jar'. (Note: I made user 'tomcat55' the owner of the folders created and of all derby jar files which I copied over, and specified 'nogroup' as group. (so I actually did not need to place anything in ../common/lib). 3) Restarting Tomcat and then opening URL http://localhost:1527/derby/derbynet returned a screen confirming that the 'Derby Netwrok Server has been started' and the screen also offers some buttons, e.g. one 'Stop' button which can be used to stop the server again. The last thing I did was to add line derby.system.home=/var/lib/derby/derbydata as the last entry in file 'catalina.properties' (found under /usr/share/tomcat5.5/conf) so that database files are created and stored in a separate location and not within the tomcat hierarchy. Hope this write up helps people looking for some guidance (beyond what is documented in the admin guide) on topic. Regards Thomas
