Making JSP webapp on Tomcat accessible on public domain

[sayeo87]

Hi,

I'm quite new to setting up webservers so I hope I can find some help here. Currently on a server that I have root access to, under /root/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT, I have a couple of .html and .jsp files which show up perfectly when I enter locally "http://localhost:8080/***.html", but when I enter "http://domainname.ecn.purdue.edu:8080/***.html" (or its many variants: with "www", without "8080" etc) (either from a network machine or a machine outside the network) Firefox gives a "Network Timeout" error.

What would be the simplest way I could make these pages be accessed publicly? I've searched on Google but I can't seem to find anything that addresses this specific task: to make jsp webpages visible on the public domain. How can I tell if it is related to the server configuration, tomcat configuration, or the way I setup my pages?

Thanks for your help!

(edit: I can ping the webserver domainname.ecn.purdue.edu successfully from outside. Trying to access the pages by using the resulting IP address instead of the domain name doesn't work either.)

[stephen84s]

Most probably the issue is your tomcat running on port 8080, chances are you most probably have a firewall which is blocking that port from being accessed from outside. Also some networks tend to block outbound traffic on 8080 port as this is usually an intranet port.

You could either try turning off your firewall altogether (not recommended if it is on a public domain) or you could just open up port 8080 inside your firewall.

Although not related to your problem I see you ave placed the tomcat installation inside your "/root" and most probably are running your tomcat instance as "root" which is also definitely not recommended. (In fact if you might not be aware many people are of the suggestion that using Linux with Root is worse than using Windows).

I suggest you place it in some other folder for ex: /opt/ and use some non-privileged user account (for ex: "nobody") or maybe create some non-privileged user account without login privileges to run your tomcat. Also remeber in this scenario you will have to change the ownership of your files from root to the user which you will be using to run tomcat.

[peter_budo]

Tomcat - The Definitive Guide should help you solve this. Here is a link from google book search for legal electronic copy. Chapter 2 is what you want to have look at

[sayeo87]

Thanks guys.

Tomcat - The Definitive Guide should help you solve this. Here is a link from google book search for legal electronic copy. Chapter 2 is what you want to have look at

I did just that and followed its instructions which said to use port 80 instead of 8080 and it works now!