Weirdness with Tomcat

We've just seen something happen on a customer box that we've never seen happen before, and I'm wondering if there could be an authority issue, or a CCSID problem.

Our Tomcat webapp context is a web overlay on an existing application. One of the things it does when it starts is to retrieve, decompress, and cache the settings files from the parent application. And it's worked just fine everywhere else.

For some reason, on this particular customer box (which was just migrated from a smaller, slower box to newer physical hardware), the cached settings files are coming up empty. No error messages or stacktraces are being logged until the webapp tries to read the empty settings files.

I've never seen anything like this before. I've already passed it on to the lead Java specialist, but I figure if it's an authority or CCSID problem, somebody here might have some ideas on where I should look.

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JHHL