Hello people. I found out that at work we'll be going over to Windows XP soon. But the problem is that our system administrator has disabled the ability to create/edit SYSTEM environment variables. I can't just ask him to enabled it because our department doesn't support JAVA :(. Previously, I had Tomcat on a Win98SE box w/o the sys admin knowledge (but don't get me wrong, I was doing work-related stuff with the tomcat server), so it wasn't an issue before. Is there a workaround to creating the JAVA_HOME, CATALINA_HOME, and PATH environment variables? What about the "User Variables"? Can I create "user variables" instead? Or can I create and run a DOS batch file that sets the necessary system environment variables for the tomcat installation?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

...damn those system administrators :( :p

Sure you can. In fact this is the way many training organisations have to do things...when a client's training machines have been crippled by admin for example, and you aren't told until you arrive and you end up having to hunt for or somehow install the executable to get a command prompt. Then you can set the local environment for that command shell. Note that the settings are lost on exiting the shell and they won't be propagated to any other shells.

Thanks, I guess you mean I can create a DOS batch file to create the environment variables. I guess I would launch DOS shell similarly as in Win98? Like I stated, don't know anything about XP and didn't have access to someone else's XP machine and play around with it. Well, this is good news. Now I can do some damage...hehe.

In WinXP open the ControlPanel, open the System utility, then click the Advanced tab. You'll see a Environment Variables button. You can click that and enter your variables there. It gives both user and system level access (of course you won't be able to set the system level.). Much cleaner than the whole .bat file thing, plus you don't have to reboot....