0

I run a server with Debian 7 (Wheezy) and a fresh installation of tomcat7.

When i try to start the tomcat service either from init.d or suing the service command i get the bellow error:

[FAIL] Starting Tomcat servlet engine: tomcat7 failed!

What makes me nuts is that the log (catalina.out) is completely empty hence i cant really troubleshoot this.

Any ideas?

giomanda
  • 1,754
  • 4
  • 21
  • 30

2 Answers2

3

I've run into a problem with identical symptoms. 

$ sudo service tomcat7 start
 * Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat7
   ...fail!
$

Nothing in catalina.out and nothing any sys logs. Finding the problem was simplified by going to /usr/share/tomcat./bin and running the startup.sh file from the command line, this displayed the error. In my case, it was a missing quotation mark in setenv.sh which caused bash to barf out during startup.

Colt
  • 2,029
  • 6
  • 21
  • 27
dlee
  • 46
  • 2
  • We had same issue, but then ran startup.sh and it started fine without errors. The new-fangled "service" crap is unreliable. I miss the old /etc/rc3.d days. – TekOps Jul 17 '21 at 06:11
0

The problem was spotted to the "catalina" config file which did not have read permissions in "group". This shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes however it took a lot of time to troubleshoot since there were no logs at all. Still there are no logs btw which i haven’t managed to find out why.

The reason catalina file was getting wrong permissions was because i used salstack framework (http://saltstack.com) to setup the server and in one of the "states" (files instructing how the setup will progress) i gave wrong permissions.

I narrowed down the problem because when i was reinstalling tomcat7 it was working properly and when i used the saltstack framework-tool which altered the config files (which in-turn gave wrong permissions) tomcat was not working.

giomanda
  • 1,754
  • 4
  • 21
  • 30