macro expansion in server.xml?

["Boyce, David" <Da...@FMR.COM>]

I have an intranet web app which must run on perhaps a couple of dozen
widely distributed Tomcat containers; some on Solaris, some Windows NT,
maybe Linux and AIX later. In  this situation the toughest challenge isn't
writing the web app per se but in maintaining the many containers, tweaking
server.xml et al manually for each. I've been experimenting with using a
Network Appliance (a fileserver that can serve UNIX via NFS and Windows via
SMB) to hold a single physical copy of Tomcat such that all these containers
are running from a single pile of bits. This is actually working quite
nicely so far except for a little holdup - they all want to write their
logfiles to the same place. So I'm wondering if there's a way to put
logfiles in, say, $TOMCAT_HOME/$HOSTNAME or otherwise indirect through a
macro/property besides TOMCAT_HOME.

I've tried setting the log paths in server.xml to absolute pathnames e.g.
/var/log/tomcat/... which works on UNIX but not Windows. Same for C:/log in
reverse; it has to be a relative path for interop reasons. Does anybody have
successful experience or ideas in this area?

Thanks,
David Boyce