Problem with tomcat translating docBase to absolute path

["Johnson, Tony S." <to...@slac.stanford.edu>]

HI, I have a context.xml file where I specify:

<Context docBase="/nfs/slac/g/glast/ground/docs">
</Context>
 
But when I look at the context using the admin app I see that Tomcat has translated the docbase to:
 
Document Base:  /a/surrey01/vol/vol2/g.glast_ground/docs
 
The problem is that /nfs/slac/g/glast/ground/docs is an NFS directory which is mounted using automount, but refering to it as  /a/surrey01/vol/vol2/g.glast_ground/docs does not trigger the automount daemon, so after a few minutes the directory is unmouned and the application starts failing.  Is there any way to prevent tomcat (5.5.15) from doing this translation, or some other way to work around the problem?
 
Thanks, Tony