How do I allow symlnked directory traversal in WASCE web app

Question

I am currently running WebSphere Application Server Community Edition v3.0.0.1 on RHEL 4 Update 9.

I have a web application was previously running on WAS 6.1 but we wanted to move to WASCE. The implementation was such that we had a symlinked directory "symdir" inside the Web Content folder that pointed to another folder on the same filesystem but outside the web application and WASCE for that matter. Under the covers we would dynamically build content in the symlinked directory and then create links to it. For example in symdir -> /tagHome we would create /tagFile/some.tag so the web app would know it as symdir/tagFile/some.tag and the f/s would know it was /tagHome/tagFile/some.tag. Then we would create a link to it at http://hostname:port/context/symdir/tagFile/some.tag and render the file--it was simple xml. This all worked before on WAS 6.1.

However, now when I move the application to WASCE on this type of configuration no longer works. Specifically I am not able to traverse any symlinked directories and get any content back. For that matter I even tried adding directories in the web application package and deploy w/ them and then tried to hit them. It's like anything /context/* is being blocked!

The last thing I tried from digging around the web was the org.apache.geronimo.tomcat.GeronimoStandardContext.allowLinking=true. Didn't seem to change the behavior.

Also found something similar here JSP files in external directory, but adding a context module in web.xml cause compiler errors.

Besides coding a servlet, any ideas? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

This fixed the issue: In the /etc/system.properties file I added:

org.apache.geronimo.tomcat.GeronimoStandardContext.allowLinking=true
org.apache.geronimo.webapplication.stage=development

Restarted WASCE and that allowed me to serve static content. Probably not the best solution for every WASCE user but worked for us.