Comments on: A Better Tomcat for Ubuntu and Debian

By: Java Applications on Privileged Ports | Stefan Reuter

Java Applications on Privileged Ports | Stefan Reuter — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:12:48 +0000

[...] approach works with any Java application and is not limited to ApacheDS. Have a look at A Better Tomcat for Ubuntu and Debian by MuleSource to see how they are using authbind without Java Service Wrapper to make Tomcat run on [...]

By: Corné

Corné — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:36:40 +0000

Hi Jason,

First of all, thanks for improving the Tomcat 6 startup and shutdown. I’m glad JSVC is no longer used and shutdowns are safe and solid.

However, I’m wondering if and when there will be an update of the tomcat6 package for Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx (LTS)?
The problem is that 6.0.24 contains a critical bug causing a JVM deadlock (https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=48694). So it’s truly important to upgrade to 6.0.27 or higher (6.0.32 is already the latest version).

Another, more general question, that I maybe should ask elsewhere: what if a new tomcat6 Ubuntu package is not released into the repository (soon enough)? Is there a way to upgrade the apt installation with the Apache Tomcat binary release manually, or even better, can I create an tomcat6 apt package myself?

I hope to hear from you soon.

Regards,
Corné

By: Casey Watson

Casey Watson — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:18:44 +0000

There is a lot of bad advice out there. What you mentioned in the article is a much better solution.

Editing /etc/default/tomcat6

AUTHBIND=yes

By: Rodrigo

Rodrigo — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:26:25 +0000

Hello Jason, I’m having trouble with my installation. I’m using the authbind and everything. But I cant override the Xxmx128m vm argument with my own. I tried modifying the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 script, the setenv.sh, and the defaults.template with my own Xmx750m but I got no result.

This is how my tomcat is running.

tomcat6 7788 4.1 21.7 759436 182340 ? Sl Mar01 0:30 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/var/lib/tomcat6/conf/logging.properties -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/usr/share/tomcat6/endorsed -classpath /usr/share/tomcat6/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/var/lib/tomcat6 -Dcatalina.home=/usr/share/tomcat6 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/tmp/tomcat6-tmp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
root 19026 0.0 0.0 6020 664 pts/1 S+ 00:06 0:00 grep java

Thanks.

ps. When you think tomcat 7 debian can be ready ?

thanks for all your work.
Rodrigo

By: Topher LaFata

Topher LaFata — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:29:31 +0000

A note. Hopefully this makes it into some documentation somewhere.

If using authbind with tomcat6 and apr connectorsto run on ports below 1024 -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true wont affect the apr stuff. Since authbind will not work with IPv6 it will seem like authbind is not working with tomcat even though you have it configured correctly.

You have to either compile apr without IPv6 support ( the apt-get libtcnative-1 has it enabled by default)

or disable IPv6 system wide by adding :

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

to /etc/sysctl.conf

This drove me crazy for a while.

By: bobmanc

bobmanc — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:15:34 +0000

SOLVED: Turns out the issue was with Struts2 feeding fileupload a bad directory. If tomcat was root it worked anyway. Not sure how it worked in Karmic.

By: bobmanc

bobmanc — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Thanks for this Jason. I just updated from karmic to lucid and everything seems to work the same except for one thing. when I try to upload a file using common fileupload I now see an error.

ERROR : Jun 16, 2010 14:53:16 [CommonsLogger.java:27] : Unable to parse request
org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileUploadException: Processing of multipart/form-data request failed. javax.servlet.context.tempdir/upload_2bd97087_129421bad1c__8000_00000000.tmp (No such file or directory)

the javax.servlet.context.tempdir points to /var/lib/tomcat6/work/Catalina/localhost/myapp which exists and to test I was able to create a new file there in my code.

This wan’t happening with the karmic build of tomcat. as far as I know everything else is the same. Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.

By: veghead

veghead — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:22:14 +0000

Could you post a link to the init script itself? Those of us running other Linux distros would be very interested in seeing your implementation…

By: Jason Brittain

Jason Brittain — Sun, 16 May 2010 01:31:20 +0000

@Terry: You’re right that if you’re going to be writing that much data to the logs you need to have something configured to rotate your logs. I think very few people would run into that problem because catalina.out doesn’t normally grow very fast — it would usually take on the order of a year or longer for the log to get that big. I don’t see any bug filed about this on the tomcat6 package:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=tomcat6

Also, I think that for those who really do want their Tomcat log messages mixed in with their system logs, there should be an easy configuration way to send the log messages to syslog instead.. though I don’t think that’s the best solution for simply rotating Tomcat’s own logs — I like using logrotate for that.

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:45:16 +0000

Hi, Looking at the out-of-the-box debian config for tomcat6 in squeeze – catalina.out never gets rotated, and tomcat crashes on the 2gig file limit. is this really better than the previous logrotate methods?

Its like we are going backwards with out of the box logging and tomcat.