Ssh – starting tomcat remotely fails to start

sshtomcattomcat7

When I run my start command via ssh it tells me that its started but it is in fact not the case. Catalina logs does not seem to capture any events either. However stop and status works.

ssh -t SERVER1 'sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 start'
Starting tomcat
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/java/default
Using CLASSPATH:       /opt/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started.

When I run the command locally on the SERVER1 it starts successfully.

I'm a bit baffled by this behaviour. Any idea what the root cause might be?

Best Answer

So this turned out to be an issue when tty was enabled via the ssh -t option. The tomcat process only remained active as long as the tty session was active. I had modify the start up script by prefixing the start up command with nohup which fixed the issue.

nohup - run a command immune to hangups, with output to a non-tty

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Ssh – Using SSH to remotely start a process

SSH connects stdin, stdout and stderr of the remote shell to your local terminal, so you can interact with the command that's running on the remote side.

As a side effect, it will keep running until these connections have been closed, which happens only when the remote command and all its children (!) have terminated (because the children, which is what "&" starts, inherit std* from their parent process and keep it open).

So you need to use something like

ssh user@host "/script/to/run < /dev/null > /tmp/mylogfile 2>&1 &"

The <, > and 2>&1 redirect stdin/stdout/stderr away from your terminal. The "&" then makes your script go to the background. In production you would of course redirect stdin/err to a suitable logfile.

See

http://osdir.com/ml/network.openssh.general/2006-05/msg00017.html

Edit:

Just found out that the < /dev/null above is not necessary (but redirecting stdout/err is). No idea why...

Tomcat – Start & shutdown as tomcat as non-root user

Tomcat on ubuntu stores configuration under /etc/tomcat*. Normal users may not have read access to all configuration files (e.g. /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml). If you'd like to run tomcat as a normal user for testing/development I'd recommend just download tomcat binary distribution and untar/unzip to some directory under your $HOME. Then run bin/startup.sh and you're done. This also saves you the hassle of running sudo for each tomcat configuration change.

BTW, if you don't have specific requirements for Tomcat5 I'd recommend using a more recent version (Tomcat6/Tomcat7).

Best Answer

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Ssh – Using SSH to remotely start a process

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