Re: Tomcat 4.0/Solaris why doesn't tomcat follow soft links?
Craig, Thanks! I missed that in the docs when I first went through them. I found the documentation on this feature, and now am wondering how much you know about it. On the system I am forced to configure this on, the users accounts are mounted from a central nfs server. This means that they do not have entries in the /etc/passwd file, which I gather from the documentation is used to generate the default Contexts. It appears there is a homeBase option which allows you to specify the location of a series of home directories. Do you know if I can use /home, as the students directories are automounted there? Or do the home directories have to be hardmounted? I'm experimenting with this option on a test server I have, and haven't gotten it to work with a test case yet...If I get something working I'll let you know. A very appreciative, Bob Evans At 10:56 AM 6/14/2001 -0700, you wrote: On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Robert Evans wrote: Greetings, I am in the process of configuring Tomcat to be used with several classes at the Johns Hopkins University. I would like to have each student have their own webapp in their public_html directory. I tried Tomcat 3.2.1, but couldn't get the security policy to work right (all jsp pages kept wanting to use the examples directory?) I am trying Tomcat 4.0B5, and was going to use soft links in the webapps directory to point to each students public_html directory. The only problem is that Tomcat doesn't seem to want to follow the soft links. If I make a real directory in the webapps dir, everything works fine, but if I try to use a soft linked one, I get: Http Status 503 - This application is not currently available The requested service(This application is not currently available) is not currently available Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. If I don't get this working within a week, it'll be back to the Java Web Server. :-( Bob Not following symlinks is an unfortunate side effect of the processing that Tomcat has to do to avoid directory name spoofing (/WeB-iNf) on case insensitive platforms). :-( For Tomcat 4, have you tried using the user home directories option, to automatically recognize each student's public_html directory? This will save you having to configure them all into server.xml: Host name=localhost ... ... Listener className=org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig directoryName=public_html userClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.PasswdUserDatabase/ ... /Host Craig McClanahan
Re: Tomcat 4.0/Solaris why doesn't tomcat follow soft links?
On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Robert Evans wrote: Craig, Thanks! I missed that in the docs when I first went through them. I found the documentation on this feature, and now am wondering how much you know about it. On the system I am forced to configure this on, the users accounts are mounted from a central nfs server. This means that they do not have entries in the /etc/passwd file, which I gather from the documentation is used to generate the default Contexts. It appears there is a homeBase option which allows you to specify the location of a series of home directories. Do you know if I can use /home, as the students directories are automounted there? Or do the home directories have to be hardmounted? I'm experimenting with this option on a test server I have, and haven't gotten it to work with a test case yet...If I get something working I'll let you know. Well, since you're willing to be a bleeding edge pioneer (and since I wrote this stuff), I'd *better* be willing to help! :-) If the users do not have entries in /etc/passwd, you are going to want to use an alternative strategy to tell Tomcat what directories to look at. Try something like this: Listener className=org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig directory_name=public_html homeBase=/home userClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.HomesUserDatabase/ The key difference is that we're using a different userClass attribute -- the one that says mount all the user directories found in the directory named by the 'homeBase' attribute instead of the one that says mount all the user directories found in /etc/passwd. Note also that, currently, Tomcat requires a user's public_html directory to have a WEB-INF/web.xml file in it before it's recognized as a web app. That requirement is subject to negotiation (or perhaps even a configuration flag) as far as I'm concerned, but it seemed correct when I originally wrote this code. And, of course, the operating system username under which you're running Tomcat must have read access to the contents of the users's public_html directories, and all the directories above them in the filesystem. A very appreciative, Bob Evans Craig At 10:56 AM 6/14/2001 -0700, you wrote: On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Robert Evans wrote: Greetings, I am in the process of configuring Tomcat to be used with several classes at the Johns Hopkins University. I would like to have each student have their own webapp in their public_html directory. I tried Tomcat 3.2.1, but couldn't get the security policy to work right (all jsp pages kept wanting to use the examples directory?) I am trying Tomcat 4.0B5, and was going to use soft links in the webapps directory to point to each students public_html directory. The only problem is that Tomcat doesn't seem to want to follow the soft links. If I make a real directory in the webapps dir, everything works fine, but if I try to use a soft linked one, I get: Http Status 503 - This application is not currently available The requested service(This application is not currently available) is not currently available Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. If I don't get this working within a week, it'll be back to the Java Web Server. :-( Bob Not following symlinks is an unfortunate side effect of the processing that Tomcat has to do to avoid directory name spoofing (/WeB-iNf) on case insensitive platforms). :-( For Tomcat 4, have you tried using the user home directories option, to automatically recognize each student's public_html directory? This will save you having to configure them all into server.xml: Host name=localhost ... ... Listener className=org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig directoryName=public_html userClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.PasswdUserDatabase/ ... /Host Craig McClanahan
Re: Tomcat 4.0/Solaris why doesn't tomcat follow soft links?
On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Robert Evans wrote: Greetings, I am in the process of configuring Tomcat to be used with several classes at the Johns Hopkins University. I would like to have each student have their own webapp in their public_html directory. I tried Tomcat 3.2.1, but couldn't get the security policy to work right (all jsp pages kept wanting to use the examples directory?) I am trying Tomcat 4.0B5, and was going to use soft links in the webapps directory to point to each students public_html directory. The only problem is that Tomcat doesn't seem to want to follow the soft links. If I make a real directory in the webapps dir, everything works fine, but if I try to use a soft linked one, I get: Http Status 503 - This application is not currently available The requested service(This application is not currently available) is not currently available Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. If I don't get this working within a week, it'll be back to the Java Web Server. :-( Bob Not following symlinks is an unfortunate side effect of the processing that Tomcat has to do to avoid directory name spoofing (/WeB-iNf) on case insensitive platforms). :-( For Tomcat 4, have you tried using the user home directories option, to automatically recognize each student's public_html directory? This will save you having to configure them all into server.xml: Host name=localhost ... ... Listener className=org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig directoryName=public_html userClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.PasswdUserDatabase/ ... /Host Craig McClanahan
RE: Tomcat 4.0/Solaris why doesn't tomcat follow soft links?
We have for all developers apache + tomcat running on different ports. (7401, 7501, 7601 and 7701). Most of the stuff from apache is symlinked and the core of tomcat is shared. so the home directory looks a bit like this : (please think /home/username/ in front of the directories apache bin (shell scripts such as tomcat.sh, startup.sh, apachectl etc) conf (tomcat and apache conf, using the correct port numbers) devel (developers stuff, such as checkout) htdocs lib logs - /home/martin/apache/logs shared - /home/shared webapps work Have fun, Martin van den Bemt -Original Message- From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 7:56 PM To: Robert Evans Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Tomcat 4.0/Solaris why doesn't tomcat follow soft links? On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Robert Evans wrote: Greetings, I am in the process of configuring Tomcat to be used with several classes at the Johns Hopkins University. I would like to have each student have their own webapp in their public_html directory. I tried Tomcat 3.2.1, but couldn't get the security policy to work right (all jsp pages kept wanting to use the examples directory?) I am trying Tomcat 4.0B5, and was going to use soft links in the webapps directory to point to each students public_html directory. The only problem is that Tomcat doesn't seem to want to follow the soft links. If I make a real directory in the webapps dir, everything works fine, but if I try to use a soft linked one, I get: Http Status 503 - This application is not currently available The requested service(This application is not currently available) is not currently available Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. If I don't get this working within a week, it'll be back to the Java Web Server. :-( Bob Not following symlinks is an unfortunate side effect of the processing that Tomcat has to do to avoid directory name spoofing (/WeB-iNf) on case insensitive platforms). :-( For Tomcat 4, have you tried using the user home directories option, to automatically recognize each student's public_html directory? This will save you having to configure them all into server.xml: Host name=localhost ... ... Listener className=org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig directoryName=public_html userClass=org.apache.catalina.startup.PasswdUserDatabase/ ... /Host Craig McClanahan
