Issued:
2012-06-20
Updated:
2012-06-20

RHBA-2012:0945 - tomcat6 bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

tomcat6 bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated tomcat6 packages that fix several bugs and provide an enhancement are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.

These updated tomcat6 packages provide fixes for the following bugs:

  • Previously, in certain cases, if "LANG=fr_FR" or "LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8" was set as an environment variable or in "/etc/sysconfig/tomcat6" on 64-bit PowerPC systems, Tomcat may have failed to start correctly. With this update, Tomcat works as expected when LANG is set to "fr_FR" or "fr_FR.UTF-8". (BZ#697968)

  • The "/usr/sbin/tomcat6" wrapper script used a hard-coded path to the "catalina.out" file, which could have caused problems (such as logging init script output) if Tomcat was being run with a user other than "tomcat" and with CATALINA_BASE set to a directory other than the default. With this update, the wrapper script redirects output to ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.out for all "start", "start-security", and "stop" actions. (BZ#701759)

  • Using the URL class coupled with the setChunkedStreamingMode() function caused a null pointer exception error and HTTP response status code 405 was returned. A patch has been applied which adds a check for form data before processing. If the requested body length is zero, a null is returned without further processing. As a result, the error no longer occurs in the scenario described. (BZ#748813)

  • Due to a regression, when a JavaServer Pages (JSP) tag that does not allow JSP Expression Language (EL) expression values (such as struts 2 tags) was used, and one of the attributes was passed a certain value (such as a backslash), the parser threw the following exception:

    According to TLD or attribute directive in tag file, attribute value does not accept any expressions

JSP parsing utilizes the directive attribute "deferredSyntaxAllowedAsLiteral" which determines if deferred statements are treated as literals. The default is false. If true, the "#" sign will not be treated as an escape. This update applies an upstream patch and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#783567)

In addition, these updated packages provide the following enhancement:

  • With this update, the tomcat6 dependency on redhat-lsb has been removed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux tomcat6 strives to have Linux Standards Base (LSB) compliant systemv init scripts. However, Java has been absent from the list of compliant binaries since 2011. Since Tomcat runs in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), there is little that can be done in addition to the init script compliance. The redhat-lsb dependency can be removed with very little risk. (BZ#782400)

Users are advised to upgrade to these updated tomcat6 packages, which provide numerous bug fixes and enhancement.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian6ppc64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6i386
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems)6s390x
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6i386

Updated Packages

  • tomcat6-jsp-2.1-api-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-admin-webapps-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-6.0.24-45.el6.src.rpm
  • tomcat6-lib-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-servlet-2.5-api-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-docs-webapp-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-el-2.1-api-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-javadoc-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm
  • tomcat6-webapps-6.0.24-45.el6.noarch.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)

Additional information