Just wondering… in your server.xml host tag configuration I can see a dash inbetween the tags directive and the path attribute. Is that a typo?
<Host name="homeApps.local" appBase="webapps">
<context-path="" docBase="/var/www/sites/homeApps">
<Alias> www.homeApps.local</Alias>
</Host>
Shouldn’t it be…
<Host name="homeApps.local" appBase="webapps">
<context path="" docBase="/var/www/sites/homeApps">
<Alias>www.homeApps.local</Alias>
</Host>
Pretty sure that will break or Tomcat ignore the directive. There is also a space precending in the alias value. However, above you are using the context directive Are you using mod_cfml and that directive together? Wouldn’t that be a problem? If you want to deactivate mod_cfml and use another approach of setting up the web context , here is a walkthrough on windows in another (unrelated) post, which in Tomcat is pretty the same on linux: