OK, I have a *procedural* resolution to my issue, however I do not yet
understand the underlying functional mechanism to my satisfaction. For
those who only care about the bottom line, here it is:
* If you want to use Tomcat as a Windows service, use the .zip Tomcat
* distribution, not the .tar.gz distribution.
I think it is worth elaborating some though. If anyone out there has
influence on the build and/or documentation, I hope you will read further.
1. Rainer Jung suggested that the behavior difference I see between the two
distros could be expained by line-ending differences/incompatibilities
(particularly in config files). This does NOT appear to be true in my case.
I've looked at the .xml files in the /conf directory, and they have *nix
style line endings in BOTH distros.
1.1. The fact that the .tar.gz version is so close to correct on Windows,
makes me hope to eventually track down the precise cause of failure; it
might be interesting. Remember, I have seen Tomcat work flawlessly for more
than a month when run as an app, and the Windows service installs without
visible error. It is only that the server won't return pages when run as a
service.
2. If the .tar.gz archive is targeted for *nix only, it sure would be nice
if this was stated explicitly on the download page:
http://tomcat.apache.org/download-60.cgi
2.1. I followed the README link -- it only goes to a page that says
"Hosted by Linux resources"
2.2. In the file RUNNING.txt, there is also no explicit mention of
differences. In fact, I get the strong impression that both are equivalent
since the instructions just say to use different startup scripts for the
different platforms. At very least, can I suggest adding my experience as
"Troubleshooting" issue (4) at the bottom of this file?
3. From what I am seeing, it appears that the .zip and .tar.gz archives were
actually created from different source trees, as oposed to just being
different compressions of the same source. The differences are minor, but
not attributable to tar version incompatibilities, for example. If that is
true, then I suggest NOT adding files with extension .exe to the .tar.gz
build/distribution. Doing so seems like an implicit confirmation that the
distro is meant to be run on Windows.
For those of you who think that I deserved this for being silly enough to
extract the .tar.gz distro on Windows in the first place, well, maybe.
I'll definitely use .zip in the future whenever there is an option. But
keep in mind that I've used tar quite a bit on Windows -- I haven't seen
anything like this before. When I first downloaded Tomcat, I remember
thinking it was really cool that it could be offered as a platform
independent "Binary Distribution" thanks to Java. And man, the failure mode
is subtle -- I didn't see it until after a month of use.
Chuck, sorry to report such a silly resolution. But I'm still kind of glad
for the experience. Although a lot of your advice turned out not to be
related to my problem, I'm a better Tomcat user as a result. Thanks for
your patience.
-andrew
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