Purpose

Currently, Crowd Data Center adds a /shared path automatically to your <home-dir> on each node during install. Atlassian recommends setting up a remote directory mount point (such as NFS) and mounting it on each of the <home-dir>/shared directories on each node (as mentioned on Step 2 of Installing Crowd Data Center). However, there is another way.

Solution

You can pass the shared home path as a JVM argument to Crowd Data Center in <install-dir>/apache-tomcat/bin/setenv.sh as a JAVA_OPTS property.

1. Open up a terminal to the Crowd Data Center node, navigate to <install-dir>/apache-tomcat/bin/setenv.sh.

2. Edit setenv.sh and add the following JAVA_OPTS property below the first JAVA_OPTS property:

   JAVA_OPTS="-Dcrowd.shared.home=/path/to/shared $JAVA_OPTS"

   Replace /path/to/shared with your remote shared path.

3. Save the setenv.sh file.
4. <OPTIONAL> Copy all of the files from the default home directory path (<home-dir>/shared) to the new shared home path.
5. Do this for all the Crowd Data Center nodes in the cluster, making sure to set the same remote directory path for each node (e.g. via NFS).

 Please note that you need to restart Crowd in order for those changes to be picked up by Crowd.

Other Considerations

Keep in mind that the shared home should be a single remote directory shared between the Crowd Data Center nodes, so this new path needs to be reachable by each of the nodes. Do not set different shared home paths between different nodes in the same cluster as this defeats the purpose of shared home.