[Aimmath-developers] tomcat and AIM (RE:was installlin.html)

[Manolis M. <ma...@ma...>]

Greg asked:

> Can you explain that please? Have you created a group or user for tomcat4?
> ... so that it need not run as root, or something? Up 'til now tomcat here
> has been running as root and hence writes various things like compiled AIM
> questions with root permissions. Do you avoid that?

The linux I was testing things was not so clean as I thought it would be and
now
I am quite confused and I can't test more things here at the moment.

What happened is at some point I installed tomcat 4.1.something that came
with an RPM. This creates a tomcat4 user and a tomcat4 group who has
privildges to start, stop tomcat etc. Also when an application starts it
gives ownership of all files to tomcat4 user. There is no RPM for 4.1.27 so
I am not sure they still want things to happen this but when I installed
tomcat4.1.27 I gave ownership to tomcat4 and my user (manolis) belongs to
the tomcat4 group as well so I am able to copy, move, delete files etc.

Perhaps all of these work with any created user and for instance one could
create a user (perhaps a special one, I am not a good linux admin sorry) on
their own and chown -R the whole dir to it and have the same effect... why
don't you try it ? I would really want to know.

> Is this with any Tomcat e.g. 4.1.18 (what I currently have) ... and with
> port 80, I guess that becomes
>
> http://localhost/manager/stop?path=/AIM
>

the manager application is usually disabled you have to add something at the
server.xml see

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/manager-howto.html

and then you can do lots of goodies

> I guess that won't work remotely will it? i.e. with
> localhost replaced with the full URL. Do you have to run this as
> the tomcat4 user you mentioned?

it works remotely but it's pretty safe as it needs a password (which you set
at the users xml in conf directory BTW if you do the tomcat4 user chmod then
it's better to leave this directory to root)

I usually have it enabled during development and then I disable it.

Manolis