Please forgive any misuse of terminology here. I am a sysadmin involved in devops deployments of tomcat servers and applications, but I don't really know much about how tomcat actually works. I am a unix guy!
We recently had a deployment of a third party application that resulted in tomcat throwing 404 errors on any content of a symlinked directory that was contained in/under an aliased path. It seems to me that it is something in the app configuration gone awry, but the vendor claims not. So I am casting about for some information here after not coming up with anything definitive in the docs or by act of google. Example: 1) The context.xml for the root context has the following: aliases="/static=/pnas/legacy/static" 2) /pnas/legacy/static/ has a symlinked directory that functions as expected at the o/s level: [root@exampleserver]# ls -lad /pnas/legacy/static/Digital lrwxrwxrwx. 1 appsrv apps 34 Jul 17 21:40 /pnas/legacy/static/Digital -> /pnas/editorial/Digital/ 3) tomcat runs as the appsrv user and all files in /pnas/editorial/Digital/ are owned by appsrv:apps, so we would expect <webroot>/static/Digital/* to be accessible without error 4) attempts to access files in <webroot>/static/Digital result in a 404 error ... but this was not the case before this last app deploy 5) reverting the build of the app is not possible as it was one part of a really big multiheaded deployment. We can work around the issue but accrue signifcant technical debt as a result. 6) Versions of anything relevant other than the app itself have not changed: tomcat = 7.0.56 java = 1.7.0_71 o/s = Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.8 (Santiago) 2.6.32-642.11.1.el6.x86_64 Question: Does the use of symlinks under aliases require some like an "allowLinking" attribute or something else that could have misconfigured in the app? The docs don't really address this case and I can only find reference to "allowLinking" affecting material symlinked directlly in or under the web context root. Aliases appear to be suggested as an alternative and symlinks under an alias are not specifically addressed (that I have seen). Any thoughts are appreciated and please do pardon any tomcat vocabulary that I may have injured in this effort to pose a question. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
