So you want to upgrade from 9.2.x to 10.2.14

[Ulrich Lazar]

This is not strictly a question, but more so a aggregation of problems i ran into when upgrading our confluence cluster. Some have been solved, some not (yet). If you have any ideas/tips for the latter ones, they are greatly appreciated; but mostly this is for some other poor sod that runs into the same problems and could use a helping hand (or word for that matter).

So, the usual backups, pg_dumps etc. aside i have an ansible playbook that takes care of downloading the confluence zip, adjusts a few variables and - a new addition - takes care of the oh-so-lovely UPM truststore certificates. Don't even think about starting your instance without them if you ever looked in the direction of the atlassian marketplace. Further instruction on this topic can be found here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/upm/configuring-upm-app-signature-check-1489470544.html

Having learned from our staging environment i was confident that our (numerous) addons wouldn't make a problem. "How naive" one might think - and one would be right.

After starting confluence.service for the first time i was met with a wall of ERROR messages in the log files, mostly related to the Osgi Plugin being unable to resolve... well basically anything.
But don't fear, there is always the handy "--disable-all-addons" flag for start-confluence.sh (start the script as the confluence user - else you'll end up with files/folders confluence probably won't be able to access).
After successfully starting confluence it was a matter of upgrading all our addons to the newest version and providing about half of them with their license keys (which had gone missing mysteriously).

We shut down confluence with stop-confluence.sh and tried the systemd.service once again. This time successfully: confluence was up and returned the so much sought after "RUNNING".

First server up and running i updated the other two and they promptly popped up in the clustering list. What else could go wrong you might ask? Hold on to something sturdy, we're going for a ride:

• on the License Details Page the server ID shows up as $action.serverID - easily fixed manipulating the confluence database: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/server-id-shows-as-action-serverid-action-sid-or-n-v-181536632.html
• Scroll Translations - activated for some spaces, not for others (and yes, i'm only talking about spaces that used it before the upgrade). This as well is a rather simple fix: just go the space in question and activate Scroll Translations - if you know which spaces should use it... Similar in origin to the $action.serverID - values from BANDANA table somehow don't make it to the plugin_setting table.

And now for the really fun ones (a.k.a.: the problems i opened a support ticket for):

• those User macros you so lovingly handcrafted in velocity? They're gone. And i don't mean "they don't render properly", nonono. The "installed User Macros" list is wiped clean. Nothing. Nada.
• and last but in no ways least: you've heard about those "Spaces", yes? Wouldn't it be awesome if we could make more of those?  Tough luck, unknown server error says "no". The logs say "java.lang.NullPointerException: date must not be null"
  I've found several similar articles on the topic - the one that got closest is here: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence/kb/creating-new-page-or-space-loads-forever/ but unfortunately none of the solutions fit.

As i've already said: some of these problems have already been solved, the rest hopefully will be soon with the help of atlassian's support team. I will aim to [update | comment on] this once the solutions present themselves in case somebody else needs them.

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

Thanks for documenting this, posts like these are incredibly valuable because they capture the "unknown unknowns" that release notes rarely mention.