tomcat3 user and password

[rock]

I installed and configured tomcat on my Linux box well over a year ago and it's been doing its job fine. Today, I needed to add a new webapp, and I find that everything under the webapps directory is owned by "tomcat3:tomcat3" and the directories didn't have write access.

To get my stuff in, I chmoded the directories 777, and all seems to be fine, but the new stuff is owned by a different user (me) in a different group (users). Should I bother chowning everything back to the tomcat3 user? I wanted to su and do things as him (her?), but I don't know the password - and I don't know if it'll break anything if I change it.

Can anyone enlighten me, please?

[BloodRed]

If you're unsure how the account is being used, I'd be a bit hesitant to change the password as well. Is this a business system or personal server? If there are high implications for downtime, I'd suggest leaving the tomcat account as is for now and doing some research on what may be using it and whether or not it's being used as a logon account for an app. Once you're sure it's not gonna break anything, go ahead and change the password.

[rock]

Thanks for the input. Everything's working right now even with my user owning some files. This is a personal server, mostly for testing work things - but no customers see it, so downtime isn't an issue.

I guess I don't understand enough about how these accounts are used by different processes. The tomcat java process are running under this tomcat3 user, but nothing else is. I'm sure it's a made-up account just to make sure the server isn't running as root. But I don't know if it needs to have access to the password to run under that user or not.

Since things are working, though, I'll probably just chown everything so I can't write over it accidentally. Next time I have to add something in there, maybe I'll be more enlightened.