the welcome file should be a pure html/jsp file without any jsf extension.
I tried the following and got a solution. The following is the index.jsp
And my web.xml looks like
So my url looks like
http://server_address/appln_name/faces/login.jsp
I can access also through
http://server_address/appln_name.
Use c:redirect instead of jsp:forward because jsp session gets invalidated during session timeout.
Hope this resolves your problem.