Jira no longer works after server restart.

unknown

We are using Jira Server deployed in AWS and we have deployed it behind an Application Load Balancer which allows both http and https.
We recently restarted our server due to high utilization.
When the server booted up, it started the jira app, but we can no longer access the jira dashboard.
Initially, we thought it was a Load Balancer issue so we disabled it and tried accessing jira via the IP. When we access the IP:8080, it gets redirected to https://IP:8443 which no longer works.

This was our server.xml settings before when we used Load Balancer:

<Connector port="8080"
maxThreads="150"
minSpareThreads="25"
connectionTimeout="20000"

enableLookups="false"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
protocol="HTTP/1.1"
useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="100"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
bindOnInit="false"
scheme="https"
proxyName="jira.cloud.oleloapp.com"
proxyPort="443"
/>

<Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true"
scheme="https" secure="true"
clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
keystoreFile="conf/keystore" keystorePass="s00perSeeekrit"
/>

I disabled the Load Balancer and re-configured server.xml:

<Service name="Catalina">

<Connector port="8080"

maxThreads="150"
minSpareThreads="25"
connectionTimeout="20000"

enableLookups="false"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
protocol="HTTP/1.1"
useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="100"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
bindOnInit="false"

 

Even when I remove redirectPort="8443", it still forces redirection to https.

Testing simulations...

[root@ip-172-31-31-159 conf]# curl -v localhost:8080
* Rebuilt URL to: localhost:8080/
* Trying 127.0.0.1...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 8080 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:8080
> User-Agent: curl/7.53.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302
< Cache-Control: private
< Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC
< Location: https://localhost:8443/
< Content-Length: 0
< Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:11:19 GMT
<
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact

 

[root@ip-172-31-31-159 conf]# curl -v https://localhost:8443
* Rebuilt URL to: https://localhost:8443/
* Trying 127.0.0.1...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* connect to 127.0.0.1 port 8443 failed: Connection refused
* Failed to connect to localhost port 8443: Connection refused
* Closing connection 0
curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 8443: Connection refused

Andy Heinzer

I've seen this happen before on Jira instances that were configured to use SSL, but then you change those settings.   I can see that even after the changes you made to the port 8080 connector you still have the redirectPort="8443" parameter.   Sometimes this can still force the web connections to that to try to connect to another port instead.

But here is what I would recommend:

1. Stop Jira
2. Edit the server.xml once more to remove that redirectPort="8443" from the connector on port 8080
3. Save that file
4. Go into the $JIRAINSTALL/work/ directory
5. Clear the contents of this directory (we still want the /work/ directory to exist, but you can safely delete all the files and subfolders here when Jira is stopped)
6. Start Jira again

I have encountered this problem myself when trying to switch an install of Jira from HTTPS back to just HTTP.  I think that the work directory might be hanging on to a cached value here that is causing this to redirect when it should not be.   It's ok to delete the contents of that directory when Jira is stopped, when you start Jira again, it will recreate the files needed.

Please let us know the results.