Ubuntu Server 14.04 - manually installing Tomcat7

Greetings All,

We're running Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS on our production servers and I'm starting the upgrade to OVPMS 1.8 from 1.7.  On my test server, I've upgraded Oracle Java to Version 8, but see from the OVPMS installation notes that with that change, Tomcat7 must be at 7.0.53 or higher. My current Ubuntu has Tomcat 7.0.52 installed, and from what I can gather, there are no plans to backport anything higher via a .deb package. Therefore, I am left with installing a newer version of Tomcat7 manually.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu by default spreads the Tomcat7 files among a CATALINA_HOME in /usr/share/tomcat7 and CATALINA_BASE in /var/lib/tomcat7.  I've downloaded and expanded Tomcat7.0.64 to /usr/local/apache-tomcat-7.0.64 and modified /etc/init.d/tomcat7 to export CATALINA_HOME and CATALINA_BASE to reflect the new location.  Unfortunately the service will not start, declaring that Tomcat7 is not installed. I have recursively set the owner:group to tomcat7:tomcat7 for all Tomcat7 files.

While I know that I eventually will need to migrate my config files over, any hints as to where I might look next to get the service running? Or should I forensically see where Ubuntu puts the Tomcat7 files and try to reproduce that?  It seems that setting the HOME and BASE may be a better approach.

Thanks,

Sam Longiaru

Kamloops, BC

 

 

 

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Re: Ubuntu Server 14.04 - manually installing Tomcat7

OK... I got it going.  It seems that there were no policies in /conf/policy.d/ (and indeed no policy.d directory) as expected by the old Ubuntu default /etc/init.d/tomcat7 script which I have preserved.  So I copied all the policies from the old tomcat7/conf/policy.d to a new $CATALINA_HOME/conf/policy.d and all is good.... so far.  I also overwrote the old 03catalina.policy with the new catalina.policy.  

I'm thinking this is a bit of a crappy way of doing this as I now have a mix of old and new versions (new Tomcat7 with old startup and config files).  I may just decide to scrap the old startup and config files and begin fresh.

Sam

 

Re: Ubuntu Server 14.04 - manually installing Tomcat7

Not sure how you got on here Sam, I am running 1.8 on ubuntu 14.04 using the default installation of tomcat7 from the repositories. It has no issues running at all using these versions. 

Matt Y.

 

Re: Ubuntu Server 14.04 - manually installing Tomcat7

Hi Matt,

I was thinking at the time that I could save myself a lot of bother by just sticking with Tomcat7.0.52, but thought that there must be some reason why Tim A. had specified 7.0.53 or greater with Java 8.  There was quite a bit in the changelist from 52 to 53 and it looked like 53 or greater was not going to be backported any time soon.  My memory of the install/upgrade notes is that if you are still using openjdk-1.7 that the default tomcat is fine.  It was only when moving to Java 8 that Tomcat needed to be upgraded.  I decided to make the Java jump now, hence the tomcat7.0.64 install. 

Sam

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