A good day to you dear community!
After 5 days of trying to fix my tomcat6 problems, I decided to com eto the community for help...
The setup is actually rather simple. A fresh install of Novell Open Enterprise (aka Suse Linux Enterprise plus a few Novell addons) server with a fresh install of tomcat 6 (and the manager application of tomcat6 too).
This server is one of several machines which are all in a subnet and connected to the internet with Endian Firewall as a gateway.
For a better understanding, here's a link to a dropbox-folder containing all the relevant files:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/iwb9o9e3f...JCilVuyCa?dl=0
Sorry about that, but you can only attach small files and only 5 here...
I'm experiencing two problems for which I still don't have a solution after endless hours of trying:
1) The Suse Firewall doesn't let any hosts connect to my tomcat6 machine on port 8080. Apart from the standard firewall exceptions (http server, https) which you can enable in Suse (see screenshot 1), I even created custom rules for ports 8080 and 8443 just to make sure they are included. Ant to make even more sure they're open, I created that rule for internal, external and demilitarized zone.
Still, going to http://<ip>:8080 from another machine on the same subnet always results in a timeout. Well, not always, it always works as soon as I completely disable the firewall on my tomcat machine. I don't understand it, why would the firewall still block port 8080 even if it is in the exception list? (And yes, of course, I restarted the firewall after each and every configuration change, being a Windows guy, I even tried rebooting the server itself - no luck there).
2) I cannot get the authentication for the manager to work. As soon as I click "manager" on the tomcat welcome page, I get prompted for a username/password, as expected. But the correct credentials as per the tomcat-user.xml are simply not accepted.
I think I set the user by the book, following the instructions on the tomcat website itself:
From my tomcat-users.xml:
<tomcat-users>
<!--
NOTE: By default, no user is included in the "manager-gui" role required
to operate the "/manager/html" web application. If you wish to use this app,
you must define such a user - the username and password are arbitrary.
-->
<!--
NOTE: The sample user and role entries below are wrapped in a comment
and thus are ignored when reading this file. Do not forget to remove
<!.. ..> that surrounds them.
-->
<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="tomcat-admin" password="cat-dog-888" roles="manager-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>
From my server.xml:
<GlobalNamingResources>
<!-- Editable user database that can also be used by
UserDatabaseRealm to authenticate users
-->
<Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container"
type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase"
description="User database that can be updated and saved"
factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory"
pathname="/etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml" />
</GlobalNamingResources>
A bit further down:
<Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm"
resourceName="UserDatabase"/>
I don't know what's wrong here...
Tomcat is up and running, rctomcat6 start doesn't throw me any erros, and netstat -ntpl | grep 8080 shows that tomcat is listening on port 8080 as I want it to. The logfiles don't show any errors related to user authetication or tomcat6 itself, there are many errors concerning one of the installed webapps (the one called vce), but of course I tried everything also with that webapps not installed (i.e. deleted from the webapps directory), no change there either.
Any help from a linux specialist would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers and thanks a lot,
Peter