Cannot connect to Jira from remote computer

Douglas Jones

I had to change servers. I am now running in a Windows 10 VM on a corporate server. The server is in Maryland. My previous server was a Windows Server 8 VM on a local machine. I cannot connect to Jira from my local laptop, I can connect if I RDP to the Windows 10 box and access Jira there.

Any and all help welcome. We do have a proxy, but it should not come into play unless I leave the corporate backbone.

 

Thanks,

Doug

Andy Heinzer

There are two basic things you will need to know about this new server:

1. the IP address/hostname/FQDN
2. The port number Jira is running on

By default Jira runs on port 8080, but this is customizable. If you're not sure you should open up the JIRA_INSTALL/conf/server.xml file to see what connector port is open on the system to server up the site.

As for the IP address, this could be several different values if the system has multiple addresses.  On a windows machine you can see these with a command line (cmd.exe) command of "ipconfig /all".   Linux/unix systems should be able to use a terminal command of "ifconfig"

Now if your machine can reach the IP or other address of this server on that port (presumably on http, but possibly on https) then this should work.

But there are lots of other factors possibly in play here.  For example, the Jira server is likely behind at least one router/firewall that might be preventing you from establishing network connections over the port Jira is listening on.  As such if that is the case, you would need to reach out to your network admin to make sure that there are port forwarding rules in place to allow connections to reach that address on that port. 

If the new machine is running windows, you also have to contend with the Windows Firewall could be blocking incoming requests by default.   If you know the port Jira is listening on, then you will want to create a new rule to allow inbound requests to that port. 

 

I would recommend starting with good old ping.  See if you can ping the address from your machine.  If you can, that's a good sign that at least this icmp traffic can reach it.  It doesn't mean that traffic on port 8080 will necessarily be able to get through, but it's a start.  If you can't get any ping replies from that address, then it's likely that there are a lot of firewall rules in place and only very specific ports are open, like 3389 for RDP.

Or it could mean that your system can't route traffic to the IP address you're trying to reach.  Again in this case, you would need to reach out to your network admin to make sure that your network is configured to allow traffic from your network to that network/address.

Using a traceroute command might also be helpful to understand what router hops are necessary to get your traffic to that destination address.