[Spacewalk-list] why does Tomcat break if you move the webapps/rhn?

[Matthew Patton]

On Mon, 03 Sep 2012 05:11:15 -0400, Jan Pazdziora <jpazdziora at redhat.com>  
wrote:

> Why do you think that SELinux has something to do with your issue if
> it is permissive or disabled?
>
> This sounds like a general tomcat issue thou, doesn't it?

True enough. I've never used RedHat's Tomcat6. Even on RHEL I always use  
it straight and unmolested from Apache and can't recall a single case  
where moving the appdir and putting a symlink in it's place broke  
anything. What is absolutely bizarre is that .jar references via symlink  
don't work no matter if they point across filesystems or even the current  
local directory. The only way I can get Tomcat to load any of these libs  
is if I put the actual, fat .jar file in WEB-INF/lib/. But of course doing  
any file access in a SHELL follows and accesses symlinks just fine.

I'm not sure what I managed to break. Because prior to moving the RHN  
webapp from /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps to /opt/spacewalk/webapp, the  
symlinks within that tree worked fine.

Sep 4, 2012 12:49:19 PM org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappLoader start
SEVERE: LifecycleException
java.io.IOException: Failed to access resource /WEB-INF/lib/antlr.jar
         at  
org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappLoader.setRepositories(WebappLoader.java:1022)
         at  
org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappLoader.start(WebappLoader.java:653)
         at  
org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4341)
...

yet I can do this all day long. 'rhn' is a symlink, as is 'antlr.jar'

# unzip -v /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/rhn/WEB-INF/lib/antlr.jar | head -5
Archive:  /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/rhn/WEB-INF/lib/antlr.jar
  Length   Method    Size  Cmpr    Date    Time   CRC-32   Name
--------  ------  ------- ---- ---------- ----- --------  ----
        0  Stored        0   0% 11-01-2006 21:37 00000000  META-INF/
      248  Defl:X      124  50% 11-01-2006 21:37 7119d9ca   
META-INF/INDEX.LIST
...


It has been my experience that whenever something doesn't work and there  
is no rational basis for it to fail, it's SELinux' fault. Unfair?

-- 
Cloud Services Architect, Senior System Administrator
InfoRelay Online Systems (www.inforelay.com)