tomcat 'document base does not exist' error (but it does)

Question

Gentoo / Tomcat 6

INFO: Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/6.0.20
Sep 8, 2009 10:34:51 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext resourcesStart
SEVERE: Error starting static Resources
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Document base /www/rivervalley/site does 
not exist or is not a readable directory
    at org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext.setDocBase(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.resourcesStart(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(Unknown Source)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(Unknown Source)

oh really? then how come:

ls -la /www/rivervalley/site/
drwxr-xr-x 12 tomcat tomcat 4096 Sep  8 09:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 tomcat tomcat 4096 Jun 29 16:22 ..
-rwxr--r--  1 tomcat tomcat  520 Jul  3 02:15 Application.cfm
drwxr-xr-x  2 tomcat tomcat 4096 Sep  8 09:56 WEB-INF

and ...

tomcat   18916  1.0  5.5 1159188 167892 ?      Ssl  10:37   0:11 /opt/sun-jdk-1.5.0.18/bin/java -Djava.util.loggin

Hell, ANY account can read that directory so the claim is utter nonsense. What else can cause this?

Here's my relevant server.xml section:

  <Host name="rivervalley" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="false" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
     <Context path="" docBase="/www/rivervalley/site" />
  </Host>

Answer 1

Check parent directory permissions:

ls -ld /www /www/rivervalley

Both directories must have "execute" permissions for tomcat user or group.

Answer 2

  <Host name="rivervalley" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="false" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
     <Context path="" docBase="/www/rivervalley/site" />
  </Host>

I don't know much about tomcat, but have you tried putting a trailing slash on site?

ie:

  <Host name="rivervalley" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="false" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
     <Context path="" docBase="/www/rivervalley/site/" />
  </Host>