Cannot authenticate with Jira from Eclipse plug-in

Question

I'm unable to log in to JIRA from the Eclipse plug-in.
When I click Validate Settings it says that the login credentials are invalid.

What's possibly related is that whenever I try to log in to JIRA via the web the first attempt fails and I'm prompted with a Captcha test.

I suspect that the plug-in is also being prompted for the Captcha test and is unable to handle it.

How do I resolve this?

David Tong1 · Answer

The plug-in was either out of date or confused.

I went to Help->Install New Software and entered the site

http://update.atlassian.com/atlassian-eclipse-plugin/rest/e3.7
That failed with: Cannot complete the request. See the error log for details.
"Atlassian Connector for Eclipse" will be ignored because it is already installed.

I clicked "what is already installed" - it said 3.2.2 was installed, so I removed it,
restarted Eclipse and re-installed it. That seems to have fixed it.

Michael Knight · Answer

You're correct in that the CAPTCHA prompt is why Eclipse cannot log in.

JIRA will present a CAPTCHA for a particular user's login when there have been five consecutive failed logins for that user. After solving the CAPTCHA during a successful login, the failed login count will be cleared and CAPTCHAs will no longer be presented.

Most likely you have something automatically trying to log in to your OnDemand instance with bad credentials, which is triggering the CAPTCHAs. It could be a script or an application that uses the API of one of the apps. If you're having trouble tracking it down, you can contact Support, who have access to the logs and can try and help you figure it out.