How to add jars to the classpath of tomcat in JBoss EWS and RHEL

Issue

• A custom script exports the CLASSPATH environment variable and executes catalina.sh start to start the server, but the CLASSPATH additions are not honored.
• CATALINA_BASE/lib is ignored on private tomcat6 instances.
• in a RHEL6 default install of Tomcat6, libraries placed in CATALINA_BASE/lib are being ignored (not loaded). Only libs placed in CATALINA_HOME/lib are being loaded. This is not the expected behavior for Tomcat6.