Hi,

Q1)
Probably still a user-rights problem. Make sure user nobody has rwx on
$TOMCAT_HOME/work and access to all context dirs (under webapp)

Q2)
You might encounter several problems here. With some clever links and
mod_rewrite rules you might establish a per user mapped context-dir but do
you want to have all 3500 with in one Tomcat instance(one JVM). If one needs
to reload/stop a servlet the engine has to be stopped for all 3499 users as
well.
To bypass that you will need a separate Tomcat for each user with will lead
to a lot of memory and cpu consumption.

Reagards,
Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Bussenschutt [mailto:D.Bussenschutt@mailbox.gu.edu.au]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 4:31 AM
> To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: Q's: running tomcat as 'nobody', and thousands of servlet
> context entries
> 
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I've read the tomcat-apache howto at:
> http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/jakarta-tomcat/src/doc/tomcat
> -apache-howto.
> html
> (and also the users-guide, the mod_jk howto, the list 
> archives etc etc.)
> 
> I have installed: linux 2.2.14 ; apache 1.3.12 (mod_ssl & 
> php4  & mod_so
> statically linked; mod_jk, etc etc dyn. linked); tomcat 
> 3.2beta8 (milestone
> release) ; mod_jk compiled and installed
> 
> QUESTION 1.
> 
> When I run tomcat as 'nobody' as suggested in the above howto 
> document, I
> was initially getting all sorts of problems with 'nobody' not having
> permission to write the log files etc, but with that all 
> fixed, I now get
> the following jsp errors from tomcat on startup:  
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------
> cannot load servlet name: jsp
> cannot load servlet name: jsp
> cannot load
> servlet name:
> jsp
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------
> 
> but it doesn't seem to prevent the example jsp and servlets 
> from working 
> (once the log file permissions are fixed) ... what does it mean?
> 
> When I run tomcat as 'root' these problems don't exist, and 
> the jsp and
> servlet examples run fine.
> 
> So, can you give me any hints as to what the problem might be?
> 
> QUESTION 2.
> 
> I have another server I wish to install this on, and it has about 3500
> users (students) that will all be wanting to use servlets/jsp in their
> projects.  They all get http://localhost/~username/ access to 
> their pages,
> and also get cgi access through a global apache directive of :
> ScriptAliasMatch ^/([^/]+)-bin(.*) /home/$1/cgi-bin$2
> which allows cgi's within their own ~username space. 
> (seen as http://localhost/~username-bin/ and available in the file
> heirarchy as ~username/cgi-bin/ )
> 
> How do I go about giving them access to run servlets from 
> their ~username
> space?  eg:
> (seen as http://localhost/~username-servlet/ and available in 
> their own
> home as ~username/servlet/ ??? )
> It's not practical to create 3500 Context entries into the 
> server.xml, one
> for each user, so how might I go about this?
> 
> Also, How do I go about giving them access to run jsp from 
> their username
> space? 
> Is it as simple as adding a directive somewhere saying that 
> all *.jsp files
> are redirected to the JVM? If so I must have mussed that in the
> documentation somewhere...?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David.
> 
> P.S. These might be good questions to add to your original 
> 'apache-tomcat'
> howto, or to a FAQ someplace, assuming you have an answer... ;-)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> David Bussenschutt          Email: D.Bussenschutt@mailbox.gu.edu.au
> Senior Computing Support Officer & Systems Administrator/Programmer
> Location: Griffith University. Information Technology Services
>           Brisbane Qld. Aust.  (TEN bldg. rm 1.33) Ph: (07)38757079
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>