I finally decided to move the applications from my one remaining Windows (XP) machine to a VMWare virtual machine - before it goes four-paws up.

It seemed like a good time to update VMWare to the latest version, 2.0. The upgrade installed easily, as usual, but then, when I went to put the new serial number on my wiki, I found that my Tomcat instance wasn’t running. I restarted it, but it ran only briefly, and then shut down.

After some investigation, it turned out that the new web-based VMWare console (one has to ask “why?” on this one) uses it’s own Tomcat instance, and the geniuses at VMWare used a default configuration, which, of course, conflicts with a previously installed Tomcat.

The answer is to simply change the shutdown port on one or the other, by editing server.xml

This whole situation brings up a few questions:

  1. Why re-do the console as a web app and browser plug-in - just because “everyone else is doing it”? If ever there was an application that should stay a desktop app, it’s a console.

  2. Why would the VMWare folks change the http and https ports on their embedded Tomcat, but leave the ajp and shutdown ports conflicting? And why, after two years of people complaining about it, have they not changed it?

  3. Why embed Tomcat in the first place? If I were going to write an application with an embedded web server, my first choice would be Jetty. I like Tomcat (obviously), but it’s not the first thing that pops into my head when I think “embedded web server”