Bug#460879: tomcat5.5: conf/Catalina/localhost folder permissions

[Aurelien Geron]

Package: tomcat5.5
Version: 5.5.20-2etch1
Severity: important

The /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina/localhost folder is owned by root:root, which prevents tomcat from 
copying the META-INF/context.xml file (in WAR files) into it.

Tomcat fails to report this error at all, which makes this bug extremely hard to figure out. The net result is 
that the context.xml file is simply ignored.  In my case, the context.xml file is used to define a JDBC 
resource, so I get the following error message:
Cannot create JDBC driver of class '' for connect URL 'null'
I suppose other people will sometimes get other error messages, depending on what they expect to find in 
META-INF/context.xml.

The work-around is very simple.  As root, just type:
chown tomcat55:nogroup /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina/localhost

It might be a better idea to type:
chown -R tomcat55:nogroup /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina

By the way, my context.xml file contains the password for the connection to the database (as most people's I 
suppose), hence it seems to me that a chown -R go-rwx /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina would be useful.

Hope this helps.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-amd64
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages tomcat5.5 depends on:
ii  adduser                    3.102         Add and remove users and groups
ii  apache2-utils              2.2.3-4+etch3 utility programs for webservers
ii  ecj-bootstrap              3.2.1-3       bootstrap version of the Eclipse J
ii  gij-4.1 [java2-runtime]    4.1.1-20      The GNU Java bytecode interpreter
ii  libtomcat5.5-java          5.5.20-2etch1 Java Servlet engine -- core librar
ii  sun-java5-jre [java2-runti 1.5.0-10-3    Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (

tomcat5.5 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information