When having very slow ssh connections between VMs, it may be because of DNS resolution. I tried disabling DNS lookups in the sshd config file, but it didn’t help. Instead, I ended up just manually adding the relevant IP/hostnames to /etc/hosts.

Tomcat was crashing everytime I tried to access the TPC-W site. The catalina.out file listed an error saying it couldn’t find the database.properties file. This was very strange because sometimes the site worked fine, and other times it would crash.

To fix this, I edited the $CATALINA_HOME/bin/setclasspath.sh file to make it include $CATALINA_HOME/lib/ on the classpath, then made a symlink in that folder to the correct database.properties file.

I was worried this would be a problem for running both RUBIS and TPCW on the same tomcat system, but it is not an issue since RUBIS calls the file “mysql.properties”.

phew…