Security – How to set up Tomcat 7’s server.xml to access a network share with an different url

Securitytomcaturlwindows-server-2008-r2

I have Apache Tomcat 7.0 installed on a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Tomcat has access to a share '\server\share' that has a documents folder that I want to access using '/foo/Documents' in my web application.

My application is able to access the documents when I set the file path to '//server/share/documents/doc1.doc'. I don't want the file server's path to be exposed on my link to the file in my application. I want to be able to set the path to '/foo/Documents/doc1.doc'.

In http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/howto/Tomcat_More.html under 'Setting the Context Root Directory and Request URL of a Webapp' item number two says that I can rename the path by putting in a context to the server.xml file. So I put

  <Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
        unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">

    <!-- SingleSignOn valve, share authentication between web applications
         Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html -->
    <!--
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SingleSignOn" />
    -->

    <!-- Access log processes all example.
         Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html
         Note: The pattern used is equivalent to using pattern="common" -->
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs"
           prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt"
           pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" />
    <Context path="/foo" docBase="//server/share" reloadable="false"></Context>
  </Host>

The context at the bottum was added. Then I tried to pull the file using '/foo/Documents/doc1.doc' and it didn't work. What do I need to do to get it to work correctly? Should I be using an alias instead? Are there other security issues that this may cause?

Best Answer

The issue wasn't the tomcat setup. It turned out to be the application was interpreting the path to be on the C drive. I replaced the edited the path in the application to point to the share. This fixed my issue. The Java code had access to the share once I set it up correctly to point to the correct path.

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