Testing with trunk at revision 957942, thus this supposedly affects 7.0.0 as well.

In TC6 there is a separate pre-startup phase when starting Tomcat, to allow Connectors to bind to their ports before other parts of Tomcat are started.

IIRC, it is implemented by having separate Bootstrap#load(String[]) and Bootstart#start() methods [1].

[1] http://commons.apache.org/daemon/jsvc.html#Downgrading_user


When running with jsvc it will mean that Tomcat would not be able to bind to privileged ports (80).

I do not use jsvc, but I observe this issue when testing the fix for bug 49030 + bug 48625 that I applied in r957960. Essentially, it breaks the fix for BZ 48625.

To reproduce:

1. Add the following line to conf/catalina.properties

org.apache.catalina.startup.EXIT_ON_INIT_FAILURE=true

2. Start two Tomcat instances with the same configuration at the same time. The first instance starts successfully. The second instance fails, as expected, but not in the expected way.

3. Expected behaviour:

I would expect that in StandardService#initInternal() the connector.init() call fails, because it cannot bind to the port.

The exception from connector.init() is caught there and, if EXIT_ON_INIT_FAILURE flag is set, it is rethrown, then caught in Catalina#load() and then rethrown as an Error, which aborts Tomcat startup.


4. Actual behaviour:

The exception does not happen, because the connector does not try to bind to the port. It will bind when start() is called.

The startup sequence continues and then fails in Server.await().