I had trouble with tomcat. It started fine, but shutdown took a very long time (enough for eclipse to suggest killing it, for example).

Some people suggested I try the tarball from Apache, instead of using the Debian package, but that didn’t help either.

By not running tomcat from eclipse and waiting a long time for the shutdown, I finally managed to get some actual error messages:

This was usually the last message I was seeing:

INFO: Pausing Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080

After some timeout, I now got these messages:

Protocol handler pause failed
java.net.NoRouteToHostException: No route to host

No route to localhost? WTF?

I resolved it by putting all hostnames it might try (localhost.localdomain, although I use that nowhere, as well as the FQDN I’m using) into my /etc/hosts and forcing them to point to 127.0.0.1 - and voila, tomcat actually shuts down instead of pausing and then failing to notice it has successfully paused…