I have an issue regressing an update from 8.20.1 back to 8.4.2

[Richard Walsh]

This is running on a Linux box running Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS

I attempted an upgrade from 8.4.2 to 8.20.1 but, the install required a renewed license which I could not complete so I regressed back to the original version which will not complete it start up sequence.  It fails with the following error:

2021-11-11 14:45:56,657 JIRA-Bootstrap ERROR [c.a.jira.upgrade.PluginSystemLauncher] A fatal error occured during initialisation. JIRA has been locked.
com.atlassian.jira.InfrastructureException: Error occurred while starting Plugin Manager. null

Why is the Plugin Manager set as 'null' ???

When I copied the zip files from the backup it did not retain all the correct ownership mode rules which I had to reinstate even though I used 'unzip -X <backup file> and I had to remove the plugin directories

<jira_home>/plugins/.bundled-plugins

<jira_home>/plugins/.osgi-plugins

Hope someone can help.

Thanks

Rick

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

What exactly did you back up and restore when you "regressed"?

Jira doesn't have a downgrade process, you have to roll back to a backup really, if you've not just thrown away all of the upgraded system and gone back to the 8.4 entirely, you may have left 8.20 files all over the place which could easily break when you try to re-run 8.4

[Richard Walsh]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for the reply.

I have the following backups

/opt/atlassian/jira

<jira_home> which is /var/atlassian/application-data/jira

and a mysql dump

I have now moved the folders and extracted from the zip files into vanilla folders, I still had to re-create all the permissions but now JIRA will boot to an empty db.  I still need to extract data from the mysql dump file to complete the regress to 8.4.2 but I think this will be fine.

Conclusion is that some legacy files were retained in the folders which caused the error OR some entries in the db are incompatible.

In short always backup the 3 items above before attempting an update : )

Cheers

Rick