I have followed the instructions available in the alfresco wiki to make use of custom configuration files in order to override the alfresco maintained configs.
To set dir.root I have edited the file custom-repository.properties. However, this setting seems to have no effect as the dir.root is still pointing to the default ./alf_data (visible in catalina.out when starting tomcat).
Interestingly enough, the other settings that I have cahnged in the custom-repository.properties file are accepted (e.g. the database login information).
What am I doing wrong? Any help is greatly appreciated!