Tomcat 5.5 not starting on boot

Well, grep-ing the systom boot log for 'tomcat' might show an error message.

James

It turns out that the init script for tomcat on Suse 10.3 is flawed and will not work unless a user is actually logged in.

I finally just gave up and installed Tomcat 6.0.14 which incidentally is not available in an RPM but the installation is literally just untaring and putting it in some directory. Then it was just a matter of making a simple startup script:

#!/bin/bash
#
# tomcat  boot script

RETVAL=$?
CATALINA_HOME="/tomcat6"

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java"

    case $1 in
    start)
            sh /tomcat6/bin/startup.sh
            ;;
    stop)  
            sh /tomcat6/bin/shutdown.sh
            ;;
    restart)
            sh /tomcat6/bin/shutdown.sh
            sh /tomcat6/bin/startup.sh
            ;;
    esac   
    exit 0

Placing it in /etc/init.d, Chmod +X starttomcat.sh

For some reason it would still return errors when set to boot so I just added a cronjob that executed "/etc/init.d/starttomcat.sh start" on boot.

This may not be the most elegant solution but until the tomcat RPM is fixed this is the only thing that worked for me. (The premade boot script also fails to work on my full desktop Suse 10.3 install so this is not an isolated occurance)

This is probably a better solution anyway since I decided not to use Apache and route to tomcat. Tomcat 5 was the first version to have a built in component for serving static content, Tomcat 6 has since improved making apache not needed (unless one wants/needs PHP)

Dunno anything about SUSE, but I start Tomcat 5 from init using jsvc (http://commons.apache.org/daemon/jsvc.html). Jsvc is nice /c it lets you start Tomcat as any user, even one with no login shell (which is more secure).

I run Gentoo, but here's my init script which you should be able to easily adapt to SUSE:

#!/sbin/runscript
# Copyright 1999-2006 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

depend() {
        need net
        use apache dns logger netmount
        after sshd
}

configtest() {
        ebegin "Checking Apache Tomcat Configuration"
        checkconfig
        eend $?
}

checkconfig() {
        [ -z ${JAVA_HOME} ] && return 1
        [ -z ${CATALINA_HOME} ] && return 1
        [ -z ${CATALINA_BASE} ] && return 1
        return 0
}

start() {
        checkconfig || return 1
        ebegin "Starting tomcat"
        cd  ${CATALINA_HOME}
        bin/jsvc -home ${JAVA_HOME} \
            -Dcatalina.home=${CATALINA_HOME} \
            -Dcatalina.base=${CATALINA_BASE} \
            -Djava.endorsed.dirs=./common/endorsed \
            -Djava.io.tmpdir=${CATALINA_BASE}/temp \
            -cp ./bin/bootstrap.jar \
            -user apache \
            -wait 60 \
            -outfile ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.out \
            -errfile ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.err \
            -pidfile /var/run/tomcat.pid \
            org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
        eend $?
}

stop() {
        checkconfig || return 1
        ebegin "Stopping tomcat"
        cd  ${CATALINA_HOME}
        bin/jsvc -stop -home ${JAVA_HOME} \
            -Dcatalina.home=${CATALINA_HOME} \
            -Dcatalina.base=${CATALINA_BASE} \
            -Djava.endorsed.dirs=./common/endorsed \
            -Djava.io.tmpdir=${CATALINA_BASE}/temp \
            -cp ./bin/bootstrap.jar \
            -user apache \
            -wait 60 \
            -outfile ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.out \
            -errfile ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.err \
            -pidfile /var/run/tomcat.pid \
            org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
        eend $?
}

From adamzieba@gmail.com

Fri Apr 18 07:15:49 EDT 2008

Hi ZunZun,

Regarding http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=13166 , the solution to the guy's problem is that, like ubuntu and I think Gentoo, SuSE uses something to manage its boot scripts.

*YaST2>System>System Services (Runlevel)>

*click on expert radio button,

*click on the service (You need to have copied it to the /etc/init.d folder 1st)

*click on the runlevel that you want (Probably 5).

I dont really want to register on the forum, so could you post the solution. SuSE is not my 1st choice but cron jobs are def my last.

Thanks,

Adam