Obviously the subject should have been META-INF/context.xml

Sorry 'bout that.



Matt Bockol wrote:

Hi Folks,

I'm having trouble getting a context.xml file to be obeyed.

I'm using:

Tomcat 5.5.20, the stock install from tomcat.apache.org.
JDK 1.6, direct from Sun.
RedHat Enterprise Linux AS3

The application I'm installing is the Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP). The installation process generates a shibboleth-idp.war file which deploys fine when I start tomcat.

Out of the box, the IdP relies on Apache to handle authentication, but form based auth is more desirable. I edited the WEB-INF/web.xml file to add a security-contraint, login-config, and security-role, then added a realm block to the engine block in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml like this:

           <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm"
             connectionURL="ldaps://ldap.carleton.edu:636"
             userPattern="netid={0}, dc=carleton, dc=edu"
             userRoleName="objectclass"
           />

With this Shibboleth works fine, and there was much rejoicing.

This, though, breaks authentication to the Tomcat admin/manager apps which usually use the UserDatabase resource (specified in a realm block I had to comment out when adding the one above). Placing the Realm in Engine makes it the default for the whole container, so I started looking at how to make it specific to the shibboleth-idp.

Everything I've read says you should place a Context block in either:

  $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/shibboleth-idp/META-INF/context.xml
  or in
  $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/shibboleth.xml

I've tried both (not at the same time, and having removed the JNDI realm from server.xml and restored the UserDatabase based realm), with the following config:

<Context>

   <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm"
     connectionURL="ldaps://ldap.carleton.edu:636"
     userPattern="netid={0}, dc=carleton, dc=edu"
     userRoleName="objectclass"
     />

   <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
       prefix="shibboleth_access_log." suffix=".txt"
       directory="/tmp/"
       pattern="common"/>

</Context>

In both cases the /tmp/shibboleth_access_log.DATE.txt file was not created and the login form only accepted credentials from tomcat-users.xml, not LDAP. I restarted tomcat with each change. It seems like the context.xml file is being completely ignored.

When I place a context block in server.xml's host block like so:

<Host ... >
<Context path="/shibboleth-idp" docBase="/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/shibboleth-idp" debug="0" reloadable="true" crossContext="true">

       <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm"
         connectionURL="ldaps://ldap.carleton.edu:636"
         userPattern="netid={0}, dc=carleton, dc=edu"
         userRoleName="objectclass"
       />

   </Context>
</Host>

and remove the other context.xml / shibboleth-idp.xml files then the tomcat-users.xml credentials work for the manager apps and the LDAP credentials work for Shibboleth. This is what I want, but upon typing that I exepect the Tomcat gods to smite me for placing the Context in server.xml since it's explicitly frowned upon.

Is there a flag somewhere that I'm missing to enable META-INF/context.xml files? I tried using <Context override="true"> in context.xml but that didn't do what I hoped it would.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt Bockol
Web Technical Administrator
Carleton College / 507-646-4432


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