Hi folks,
just in case someone is tempted by the Starter Licence and wants to give it a try - might be interesting to read what lies ahead of you from someone who did, me.
Don't get me wrong - I also run a commercial site licenced confluence server which I administrate for another company.
I just wanted to try confluence for a small task and see how it does.
So the Starter Licence seemed just about right for that purpose.
Intent: Run confluence on a standalone Windows PC in a small (5 machines) network, make confluence available to that team.
So here we go:
1) downloaded atlassian-confluence-6.14.2-x64
2) installed trial on a win8 i7 machine
3) installs just fine, runs like a charm, and runs as a SERVICE, no problems.
4) I deal with the first problem, reset base URL from localhost:8090 to 192.168.your.IP:8090 as usual - works
5) I enter some content, all runs fine
6) confluence health check tells me I am using an internal (H2) database and that for production environment I should migrate to a proper external database. Understood. Reasonable as it is.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/embedded-h2-database-145098285.html
7) I licence Starter - for most of the time I'll use this wiki alone, later there might be 2 - maybe 3 other users - at max. - so that seems like a neat offer - thanks Atlassian.
8) I enter the licence
9) I begin migration of the instance to the new database by walking through
https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/migrating-to-another-database-148867.html
10) The two instances constantly get in each others way while I migrate, I never know on which of the two I am though I adhere to proper instance separation according to the above
11) I select MySQL 5.7 - this is a supported version, so I pick it. Okay, my fault you might say. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/supported-platforms-207488198.html
12) Setting up MySQL works ok, so long as I do not alter it. As soon as I begin entering the proper [mysqld] options according to
https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/database-setup-for-mysql-128747.html
the nightmare begins.
13) MySQL becomes slow, unresponsive, stops, doesn't work.
14) I resort to setting the options through the GUI of MySQL workbench
15) This seems to do the trick
16) The new confluence instance (separated) connects to the database just fine, re-importing my content works well.
17) I deinstall the old instance (the one with the trial database H2 type) - seems like the reasonable thing to do to sort the problems the two instances have while co-existing
18) Soon I find the option to start Confluence as a service is gone.
19) No way getting it back. Tried reinstall, re-import, everything, no way.
20) Starting confluence manually gives me an ugly TOMCAT Window that at least is telling me why my confluence stopped working, because of the MOST STUPID CONFLUENCE SETUP FLAW i ever encountered:
Sat Mar 16 13:12:59 CET 2019 WARN: Establishing SSL connection without server's
identity verification is not recommended. According to MySQL 5.5.45+, 5.6.26+ an
d 5.7.6+ requirements SSL connection must be established by default if explicit
option isn't set. For compliance with existing applications not using SSL the ve
rifyServerCertificate property is set to 'false'. You need either to explicitly
disable SSL by setting useSSL=false, or set useSSL=true and provide truststore f
or server certificate verification.
After reading through the problems others had I know what to do:
21) Find confluence.cfg.xml in $home\Program Files\Atlassian\Application Data\Confluence
22) Add ?useSSL=false in this way to: <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/confluence?useSSL=false</property> where it was simply missing
23) Everything works after that.
24) Results:
25) TOMCAT takes 10 minutes at least to start, before that ridicoulus amount of time there is no way of accessing the wiki
25) Still no way of starting confluence as a service
26) reading through the documentation of how to get a feature back (service start) that in the trial instance comes out of the box I begin to realize what's wrong here.
27) Me. I am fed up.
28) Sorry folks. This is not what I expect in 2019. Even for small money.
29) Maybe - just Maybe - when I have recovered I might try to read even more to help sort this - as I believe TOMCAT is not such a bad piece of software to cause all this.
30) Let's see if this Odyssey might lead somewhere still.
