Why is tomcat having trouble loading a self signed SSL certificate?-Collection of common programming errors

I guess you are using tomcat 5.5 compiled with gcj, on some linux distribution (debian or ubuntu?) with java-1.5.0-gcj. You can find some on topic help here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=238613

Check if the keystore indicated in the exception message is actually present, and that it is in JKS format. Or point the keystoreFile attribute in your server.xml to the cacerts file provided with your JVM (if my guess was right should be /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-gcj-4.3-1.5.0.0/jre/lib/security/cacerts ) and import there your self-signed certificate. Stock cacerts file has default password = changeit

However i suggest you to use the sun-jvm or a openjdk-1.6.0 that comes from your distro, in order to avoid a lot of hassle, in particular if it is one of your first ssl deploys.

Edit: Let me append here my working configuration:

In the /etc/pki/java/cacerts keystore, i generated a keypair with:

$JAVA_HOME/bin/keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore /etc/pki/java/cacerts

Note: if you dont specify the key alias in server.xml, the first keypair found in the keystore is used.

Important note: the keystore password MUST be the same as the private key password!