i managed to make tomcat barf an exception when trying to use the JDBCRealm class. turns out that i needed to patch org.apache.catalina.util.HexUtils: [balld@localhost util]$ cvs diff HexUtils.java Index: HexUtils.java =================================================================== RCS file: /home/cvspublic/jakarta-tomcat-4.0/catalina/src/share/org/apache/catalina/util/HexUtils.java,v retrieving revision 1.1 diff -u -3 -p -r1.1 HexUtils.java --- HexUtils.java 2000/10/21 01:26:19 1.1 +++ HexUtils.java 2001/04/17 00:25:55 @@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ public final class HexUtils { * The string manager for this package. */ private static StringManager sm = - StringManager.getManager("org.apache.tomcat.resources"); + StringManager.getManager("org.apache.catalina.util"); /** - donald