There are two related issues. Issue 1 is critical to get fixed and deployed because it's gating deployment of a new project/product (which happens to be a security product so it's critical the user account be locked down properly). Issue 2 is trivial to fix and should be done at the same time. Issue 2 is probably why the problem described in Issue 1 was not discovered.

Issue 1) The tomcat initscript cannot start tomcat if the TOMCAT_USER environment variable is set to a user daemon without a login shell (as should be the case for security).

The problem is located in the initscript (/etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat6) with the invocation of the $SU command, which is either /sbin/runuser or /bin/su. Please note there are multiple places in the initscript where $SU is invoked, here is one typical example.

$SU - $TOMCAT_USER -c "${TOMCAT_SCRIPT} start" >> $TOMCAT_LOG 2>&1

The key element here to notice is that a command line is being passed via the -c argument, this requires the user ($TOMCAT_USER) to have a shell in which to execute the -c command. But system daemons shouldn't have login shells for security reasons. If $TOMCAT_USER doesn't have a login shell then $SU aborts with the message:

"This account is currently not available."

The solution is to provide a temporary shell to $SU for the purpose of executing the -c command. This can be done with the -s arg to $SU. One possible solution would be to modify the definition of $SU in the script, thus:

# For SELinux we need to use 'runuser' not 'su'                                 
if [ -x "/sbin/runuser" ]; then                                                 
    SU="/sbin/runuser"                                                          
else                                                                            
    SU="/bin/su"                                                                
fi                                                                              


would become:

if [ -x "/sbin/runuser" ]; then                                                 
    SU="/sbin/runuser -s /bin/sh"                                               
else                                                                            
    SU="/bin/su -s /bin/sh"                                                     
fi                                                                              

Or you could add the -s arg each place $SU is invoked.

Issue 2) The tomcat6 rpm creates the tomcat system user with a valid login shell account (/bin/sh), but system daemons should never permit shell access, they should have their shell set to /sbin/nologin.

The following lines in the spec file should be changed from:

%{_sbindir}/useradd -c "Apache Tomcat" -u %{tcuid} -g tomcat \
    -s /bin/sh -r -d %{homedir} tomcat 2>/dev/null || :

to:

%{_sbindir}/useradd -c "Apache Tomcat" -u %{tcuid} -g tomcat \
    -s /sbin/nologin -r -d %{homedir} tomcat 2>/dev/null || :