JIRA Rest and Soap interfaces not working

Question

I have a JIRA instance running on the TomCat instance that is installed with JIRA. This instance is running on a server that I have full control over. It is a Windows 2008 machine with IIS7.

All traffic comes in through IIS7 and we are using a reverse proxy to TomCat. There is an SSL certificate on the domain that JIRA runs under. The certificate is installed in IIS7.

All JIRA access through a web browser appears to work perfectly, we've been using the JIRA instance in a production environment for a couple of months with pretty heavy usage and we've had absolutely no issues.

The issue is when I try to access JIRA from Microsoft Project 2003 through The Connector found here http://www.the-connector.com/index.aspx or when I try to connect to my JIRA instance from EazyBI found here https://eazybi.com/. Both of those applications give a 500 internal server error on my JIRA instance.

https://eazybi.com/ is failing with a rest api GET at /issues/rest/api/latest/project. The server returns a 500 and I see an error in my JIRA log:

2012-09-25 11:05:09,986 ajp-8009-3 ERROR      [500ErrorPage.jsp] Exception caught in 500 page null
java.lang.NullPointerException

http://www.the-connector.com/index.aspx is failing with a POST to /issues/rpc/soap/jirasoapservice-v2. Again, the server returns a 500 and I see the same error in my JIRA log.

If I go to /issues/rest/api/latest/project in my broswer I get the JSON that I would expect. If I go to /issues/rpc/soap/jirasoapservice-v2 in my browser I get a web page that says "Hi there, this is an AXIS service!"

So from just browsing to the URLS it appears that everything is working correctly but for some reason neither microsoft project connector nor the easzybi website can access my JIRA instance.

Any help in solving this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

unknown · Accepted Answer

I was able to connect directly to the TomCat server with The Connector for MS Project with no problems. I wasn't able to connect EazyBi to the TomCat server because I didn't want to make the TomCat server available over the internet.

I did contact support for both products and EazyBI support updated their website to send an arbitrary user-agent in the request header. That fixed the problem. I suggested that ecliptic do the same for MS Project but since their product is a windows executable the fix will probably not be available so quickly.

So EazyBI has fixed the problem on their end but why would putting IIS in front of TomCat suddenly make JIRA require a user-agent in the request header? I suppose IIS could be messing with the request header so that it is no longer usable by TomCat. I think the solution might be messing around with the settings of IIS to try to either automatically add the user-agent if it's blank or stop IIS from doing any modifications to the request header at all if it already is.

I'm not an IIS guru by any means so any help on where to go from here would be appreciated.

Thanks.