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?