Tomcat 5 and JNDIRealm

[John English]

Not a Java question as such -- but I'm trying to configure Tomcat
to authenticate against an LDAP server, and have cast the following
magic spell in my <Context>:

<Realm class="org.apache.catalina.realm.JNDIRealm" debug="99"
connectionURL="ldap://ldap.bton.ac.uk:389"
userPattern="uid={0},ou=People,dc=bton,dc=ac,dc=uk"/>

(I can't find anything to use as a role -- I don't care about roles
in this case, I just want to know if the username & password are OK.
However, the role-related parameters all seem to be optional according
to the Tomcat docs.)

I get a nasty error when the context starts up:

08-Dec-2004 11:34:06 org.apache.commons.digester.Digester startElement
SEVERE: Begin event threw exception
java.lang.NullPointerException
at
org.apache.catalina.loader.StandardClassLoader.loadClass(StandardClassLoader.java:769)
at
org.apache.catalina.loader.StandardClassLoader.loadClass(StandardClassLoader.java:721)
at org.apache.commons.digester.ObjectCreateRule.begin(ObjectCreateRule.java:252)
at org.apache.commons.digester.Rule.begin(Rule.java:200)
at org.apache.commons.digester.Digester.startElement(Digester.java:1273)
at org.apache.catalina.util.CatalinaDigester.startElement(CatalinaDigester.java:65)
at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.startElement(Unknown Source)

... and so on ...

08-Dec-2004 11:34:06 org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptors
SEVERE: Error deploying configuration descriptor test.xml
java.io.IOException: java.lang.NullPointerException
at
org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostDeployer.install(StandardHostDeployer.java:494)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.install(StandardHost.java:863)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:482)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:427)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.start(HostConfig.java:968)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:349)
at
org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1091)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(StandardHost.java:789)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1083)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:478)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:480)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:2313)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:556)

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here, and what the exception
really relates to?

-----------------------------------------------------------------
John English | mailto:j...@brighton.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer | http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je
School of Computing & MIS | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS **
University of Brighton | -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
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