Confluence does not anymore, has anyone else seen this?

[neal_ala]

It is running locally on a windows server.

The service is running, I do not find errors in the logfiles.

It was working last week.

We get ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED when trying to access it via a webpage, but nothing on the server indicates a problem that I can see.

I cannot get help from support because we have a starter license.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Connection refused happens when

1. The service is not running
2. The service is running, but has failed
3. A proxy is not connecting (you hit the proxy, the proxy goes to Confluence)
4. There's something blocking it on your network (unlikely, as this usually gives you a different error)

In cases 2 and 3, there will be an error in the logs telling you what is wrong.  I would start with the Confluence application log in confluence-home/log/atlassian-confluence.log, then a look at confluence-install/log/catalina.out, and then look at the proxy logs next (if you have one)

[neal_ala]

The service is running, at least windows services indicates that. If I try to stop and restart the service, windows acts like it cannot stop the service. I have to manually kill the process, then windows recognizes it as stopped. Re-starting the process, then looking at the logs, I get no indication of errors, just some warnings and info messages. I checked the log you mentioned and while it had errors from serveral days ago when all of the servers rebooted, I see no errors after starting up the service. I also checked the logfiles for tomcat as well (catalina, stdout etc). It seems tome as though the service may be crashing. But windows still thinks its running. I base this on the fact that once I start the service and try to browse to it, the browser indicates connecting then waiting for server... but spins continuously. After some period of time has gone by I try and refresh the browser, then get connection refused. I see the same behavoir when running abrowser as localhost on the server that confluence is on.  I would think there would be some sort of error to indicate what the problem is, but have yet to find it. Thank you for your previous suggestions, and any help would sure be appreciated. 

[neal_ala]

Turns out that confluence needs to hit external websites as it starts up and initializes everything including the plugins. I found this article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/confluence-is-unable-to-startup-due-to-marketplace-connectivity-issues-939939190.html which helped me because it showed me something missing in the atalssian-confluence.log file. So the fix was to configure a proxy for the tomcat instance that starts up confluence, once I did that it was able to start up completely.  Thanks gain for your input.