Tomcat refuses to start when using tomcat authentication connecting to LDAP

When you protect shibboleth-idp using tomcat authentication (rather than apache's authentication as commonly used in our instruction setup -- refer to IdP install), you may experience that tomcat refuses to start, i.e.

   export TOMCAT_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat
   $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh
   $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh
   ps aux|grep tomcat

The grep may not show any running tomcat at all, or it would just hang up where you cannot access tomcat via http://MY_DNS:8080/whateverTomcatApp

This is commonly the problem when tomcat tries to connect to your LDAP and your LDAP doesn't respond as expected. Try to check if your LDAP configuration is correct.

It's either:

• LDAP server denies the connection
• LDAP server's firewall prevents connection
• your bind credential doesn't have its required permission