login error "Sorry, an error occurred trying to log you in - please try again."

Question

We've been having intermittent login issues in production and non-production.  Our technical people have not been able to find the cause of the problem.  It's not a network issue as far as we can tell.  Our log shows error occurred while trying to authenticate user and the connection times out.   Usually, we wait about 5 minutes and then we're able to log in.  It seems to only happen with JIRA.  Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this problem?

105349 · Answer

Here are two other suggestions that you may want to try:

* Go to Administration > Users > User Directories
* Edit the LDAP directory
* Increase the value of Read Timeout

or

* Go to Administration > Users > User Directories
* Edit the LDAP directory
* Disable the Follow Referral option

Two things to keep in mind if you disable the 'Follow Referral' option:  One, if that works, (with no errors in the logs), then it's likely a DNS configuration issue on the AD server.  And two, if you're in a single domain you should see any issues.  However, if you're in a forest, then cross-domain authentication may not function correctly.

Vicki Miller · Answer

We are using LDAP.  Your answer on OU is not an option for us due to the way active directory is built.  We have 2 different OU structures that our JIRA users are under.  Any other suggestions?

105349 · Answer

Hey Vicki!

Do you happen to know what you're using for user authentication?  Local, AD, LDAP, Crowd, etc.?  That's the first place to start to try and narrow down what's going on.

Thanks!