Installing Tomcat on CentOS 5.2 - quick notes

I and a colleague just put up a Tomcat v 5 server. We need it to do experiments with Web Services hosted on Tomcat and writing and reading data on Domino and an SQL server (mySQL or DB2).

Here are my notes on getting Tomcat to work on an existing CentOS 5.2 server.
Mileage may vary, do not pour coffee into the keyboard while installing and generally think about what you do before putting company data on the public web.

We install from the command line using yum.
This command is great:
yum list tomcat

It lists all the packages that contain the word tomcat5.

To get the biggest bit over do this:
yum install tomcat5

And to get the Administration interface do:
yum install tomcat5-ad*

Also do:
yum install tomcat5-web

This will give samples to look at.

Now you have a "Tomcat 5" service available from your services list. Enable it and start it.

You now can access the front page here:
http://hostname:8080/

The server code should be in this directory:
/var/lib/tomcat5

Configuration files are here:
/etc/tomcat5

Have a look at the file called tomcat-user.xml. You will see that there is a default user called tomcat with password tomcat.
This user does not have full access to the administration-side of things. I suggest that to start out you change the password in the file and then you give this user the "admin" role.
Restart the service.
You can manage roles from the web interface - once you have the admin role that is. Now open the administrative interface:
http://hostname:8080/
Click "Tomcat Administration"
Log in
Click Roles
Add a role called "manager"
Click Users
Give the tomcat user the manager role
Click Commit Changes. This will restrat the Tomcat server

That's it