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
