vCenter 7: Catalina Logs filing up, tomcat-users.xml missing?

We were receiving errors on our vCenter servers that the log disk is getting low on disk space. According to VMWare KBs we checked what is consuming space. We found espiecially a lot of log files named "catalina_[DATE].log" with 11mb size, going back almost a year.

I checked the content of the log, and every 10 minutes it creates the same error message:

2021-04-12T23:59:53.056Z WARN org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabase Failed to close [conf/tomcat-users.xml]
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/tomcat-users.xml (No such file or directory)
    at java.io.FileInputStream.open0(Native Method)
    at java.io.FileInputStream.open(FileInputStream.java:195)
    at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:138)
    at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:93)
    at sun.net.www.protocol.file.FileURLConnection.connect(FileURLConnection.java:90)
    at sun.net.www.protocol.file.FileURLConnection.getInputStream(FileURLConnection.java:188)
    at org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabase.backgroundProcess(MemoryUserDatabase.java:700)
    at org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm.backgroundProcess(UserDatabaseRealm.java:160)
    at org.apache.catalina.realm.CombinedRealm.backgroundProcess(CombinedRealm.java:308)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.backgroundProcess(ContainerBase.java:1145)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$ContainerBackgroundProcessor.processChildren(ContainerBase.java:1381)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$ContainerBackgroundProcessor.run(ContainerBase.java:1353)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)

VMWare simply tells me to delete the files and to enlarge my log disk, which I did. But it still bugged me what is going on, and so far I did not find anthing in the web related to vCenter.

Anyone has an idea what is going on here, and how to resolve this error? I know that there are many ways to ignore it, and maybe it is safe to ignore it, but I only want to know if the error itself can be fixed.

Solution 1:

As the message says your Tomcat installation lacks a conf/tomcat-users.xml file. This is a file containing the groups and users used by Tomcat's authentication. By default this file is watched and reloaded regularly.

Therefore you need to:

• either restore the file with its default content,
• or, if you are not planning to use authentication at all, remove the <Resource> of type UserDatabase and all realms of type UserDatabaseRealm (together with the LockoutRealm in which it is nested) from your server.xml configuration file.