Top Things to Try when your Tomcat has Trouble (TTTTT)

1. Are you on the right "client" of Porsche when doing startup/shutdown (e.g. honda, acura, etc.) instead of Porsche?

2. Is your web.xml file syntax valid?

   • Hint: use "xmllint web.xml" to check the syntax.

3. Do you have exactly one Tomcat process running, on the correct port? Does anyone else have your port tied up?

• Hint: use "lsof -i" to check what port numbers you have running (do this on honda, acura, etc.)

• Hint: use "ps -fu username" to see what processes you have running (do this on honda, acura, etc.)

• Use "kill -9 pid" to kill any rogue processes (e.g. if you have more than one Tomcat running)

• Use "netstat -an | grep 8123" where 8123 is your port number to see if anyone else grabbed your port number by mistake

4. Check the logs files under $CATALINA_BASE/logs. Use "\rm *.log" to clean out the directory before you restart.

5. Put the following in your Servlet Java code to generate output in the log files. (Note: there are better ways to do logging with, for example, log4j, but this is a quick and dirty way to find a problem without dealing with that whole learning curve):

   System.out.println("FOO DEBUG: myVariable=" + myVariable); 
   System.out.flush();