Why do Jira logins sometimes fail?

Question

I have a number of tabs in my web browser (Firefox) which I use for quick reference.

When I start up Firefox in the morning:

* some of these tabs show whatever they were showing the last time I had Firefox open,
* some show our normal (JA-SIG Central Authentication Service 3.3.1) Jira login page,
* others show what looks like a standard Jira login page (this only seems to happen on my agile planning board tab).

If I try to use any page which appears as it did before then I may get shunted to a normal login page (depending on where I were).

If I try to login on a tab which appears as our normal login page (using the saved details filled in by Firefox), then it just shows the login page again having blanked the user and password fields. If I refresh the page before pressing the login button however, then it logs in as expected and returns yuo to the page you were on before.

The standard Jira login page just errors when you try to log in, but if you log in in another window refresh and repost the data then it gets you back to where you were.

This all seems very counterintuitive and is a lot to remember, is it expected behaviour or does our Jira instance have configuration issues? Why does refreshing the page before trying to log in make a difference?

Some additional information:

* The pages which appear to reload ok on startup appear to be those which don't require any authentication permissions anyway.
* My dashboard tab * http://jira.XXX.uk/secure/Dashboard.jspa reloads as 
* https://auth.XXX.uk/cas/login?service=http://jira.XXX.uk/secure/Dashboard.jspa which looks like our normal login screen.

* My RapidBoard tab * http://jira.XXX.uk/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=43&view=planning&quickFilter=85 reloads as 
* http://jira.XXX.uk/login.jsp?os_destination=/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=43&view=detail&selectedIssue=MTGDA-26&quickFilter=85 which looks like it might be a standard Jira login page.

This looks to me like RapidBoard is redirectling to a standard login page, while Dashboard is redirecting to the local organisation single sign-on.

If it makes any difference, we are on GreenHopper (v6.1.1) & JIRA (v5.0#713-sha1:aec58e2).

Zul NS [Atlassian] · Answer

You will need to contact the admin for the logs

Mark_Booth · Answer

As a user, can I get access to the JIRA logs? or will I have to contact our admin?

Renjith Pillai · Answer

This does not look normal. What happens when the login fails in the JIRA logs?