Bitbucket server - Communications link failure

Sam Hernandez

Bitbucket self-hosted gives this error:

 

The following problem occurred, which prevents Atlassian Bitbucket from starting:

• The database, as currently configured, is not accessible.
  Communications link failure

 

This just started happening the other day, no changes to the server or to the database. I can connect to the database manually via mysql client...

Sam Hernandez

I was able to resolve, or at least work around the issue. I found the following in /var/atlassian/application-data/bitbucket/log/launcher.log :

WARN: Establishing SSL connection without server's identity verification is not recommended. According to MySQL 5.5.45+, 5.6.26+ and 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 verifyServerCertificate property is set to 'false'. You need either to explicitly disable SSL by setting useSSL=false, or set useSSL=true and provide truststore for server certificate verification.

Adding &useSSL=false to the end of the JDBC connection string in /var/atlassian/application-data/bitbucket/shared/bitbucket.properties allowed bitbucket to restart successfully.

It is still not clear to me what caused this issue. The MySQL RDS configuration and the Bitbucket Server configs have been the same for months, if not years.

Bitbucket Server is end-of-life, the guides recommend against using MySQL as a backend with it, and now the configuration is less secure. But at least we are able to use the product while we come up with a plan to migrate away from it.