I have an intranet web app which must run on perhaps a couple of dozen widely distributed Tomcat containers; some on Solaris, some Windows NT, maybe Linux and AIX later. In this situation the toughest challenge isn't writing the web app per se but in maintaining the many containers, tweaking server.xml et al manually for each. I've been experimenting with using a Network Appliance (a fileserver that can serve UNIX via NFS and Windows via SMB) to hold a single physical copy of Tomcat such that all these containers are running from a single pile of bits. This is actually working quite nicely so far except for a little holdup - they all want to write their logfiles to the same place. So I'm wondering if there's a way to put logfiles in, say, $TOMCAT_HOME/$HOSTNAME or otherwise indirect through a macro/property besides TOMCAT_HOME. I've tried setting the log paths in server.xml to absolute pathnames e.g. /var/log/tomcat/... which works on UNIX but not Windows. Same for C:/log in reverse; it has to be a relative path for interop reasons. Does anybody have successful experience or ideas in this area? Thanks, David Boyce
