Comments on: A Better Tomcat for Ubuntu and Debian

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.

By: Ludovic Claude

Ludovic Claude — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:06:00 +0000

@Owen: I left this repackaging of DBCP in Tomcat, mostly because nobody complained about it in the package tomcat6 bug reports and it seems to work. If you have an issue with this, raise a bug, it should not be too difficult to switch back to the Tomcat version of DBCP. I guess that previous package maintainers chose Commons DBCP because Debian tries to reuse existing libraries as much as possible, as packaging is quite a costly operation.

By: Fabrizio

Fabrizio — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:24:27 +0000

Hi Jason,

just a quick question…. Do you have a new version script to be able to build an own custom Tomcat RPM package?
I got the script from tomcat-6.0.20-0-src.tar.gz.(from Fri, 03 Jul 2009) Inside I have found a version with a TODO.txt with many new features. Is a new version availabe to be downloaded?

Thanks

Best regards,
Fabrizio

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:25:11 +0000

Jason, I have upgraded to the latest Tomcat6 packages and changed all of my startup scripts with the new one, to use the catalina.sh script to start and stop. I had to change 6 scripts since we are using multiple instances of tomcat but it wasn’t a biggie. Authbind is working great, only binding to port 443, BUT there isn’t great documentation on how to even get Authbind working, that was the hardest part for me. Anyways, I have one unresolved issue. Since we are not using jsvc anymore, as you stated there is no stdout and no stderr, so it’s all going to /logs/catalina.out. That’s fine but this is running in a production environment and I REALLY need it to go to SYSLOG. I tried a few things but it hasn’t worked yet. Any ideas on this?

By: Jason Brittain

Jason Brittain — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:52:52 +0000

@Javi: Yes, I do think it would be a good idea to change that particular public Tomcat documentation page so that it doesn’t recommend that new Tomcat users start out using jsvc. There are probably people who have different opinions about jsvc, however. I encourage you to discuss that on the tomcat-user mailing list, and also here if you’d like.