Tomcat may fail to write to log file in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

• log file (catalina.out) is not being created properly by init script (permission issue). Newly created catalina.out log files should be writable by tomcat process.
• Tomcat fails to write to log file after /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out is removed. The log file /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out is automatically re-crated when tomcat5 service is restarted,  but the ownership of /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out is changed to root.root, making it unwritable by the tomcat process.