Confluence will not start after upgrade to 5.7

[David FALLAS]

I have just upgraded Confluence from v 5.4 to v 5.7 on Windows Server (32-bit). Attempting to start the Atlassian Confluence service using the Windows Services Applet fails because the path to the executable is incorrect ("C:\Program Files\Atlassian\Confluence\bin\tomcat6.exe").

As you can see, previously it was starting tomcat6.exe but 5.7 installs tomcat7.exe instead.

In the Registry there are two entries for Confluence - SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Confluencexxxx and Confluenceyyyy (where xxxx and yyyy are long integers). The v 5.4 entry has 8 settings, one of which is ImagePath pointing to tomcat6.exe, the other Confluence entry has only one setting ImagePath which points to tomcat7.exe, but no other settings.

It therefore appears that the installer failed to correctly register the new service.

Can anyone advise me as to what the correct sc command line options are for Confluence v 5.7 so that I can remove the old Confluence service and install the new one?

EDIT

It actually got worse when I found that I was unable to unzip the back-up zip files to in order to restore v 5.4. These .zip files appear to contain files with names that 'mirror' sub-directory names and therefore prevent extraction. Fortunately, a simple copy of the Confluence Home directory had been manually made immediately prior to the upgrade attempt. I finally resorted to downloading the v5.4 installer to perform a re-install and overwrote the Home directory with the manually-made copy. So there are now two questions: * why did the v5.7 installer fail to properly create a Windows service? * why did the .zip files created as backups of the v5.4 home and installation by the v5.7 installer contain files with names that mirror directory names?

[Brian · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

There's a known bug (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-33492) with Confluence 5.5 in which the Windows service won't start because of what you described. In a nutshell, the Windows installers didn't correctly modify the service to point to tomcat7.exe, so new installers were released for 5.5.1 that fix the issue. However, if you're seeing this same behavior in an upgrade to 5.7, that could signify a regression of the problem. 

If you're still seeing this issue, there's a workaround you can apply, which is described in the bug report. Or you can upgrade to 5.5.1 using one of the fixed installers in the bug report, and then upgrade to 5.7. 

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Brian 

[David FALLAS]

Thanks Brian. What I did to get a working system back was to uninstall 5.7, reinstall my original 5.4, then finally install 5.6.6. This last step correctly modified the Windows Service Manager Properties (to tomcat7.exe). It is possible that the bug may have returned, but I don't want to confirm that as I am happy at 5.6.6 and will wait for 5.7.1 before trying again.

[Davin Studer]

Typically in any software install going from multiple versions back to the most recent is best handled with a couple upgrades. Have you tried going from 5.4 to 5.5 or 5.6 and then to 5.7? You might have better luck. Also, I have found that some of the Confluence upgrades respect custom http ports (we switched ours over to 80 instead of the default of 8090) and some don't. So, If you do a two step upgrade keep in mind that that may happen if you are using a custom http port. So you'll need to put it back in the server.xml file if it happens. Also, it is a good idea to test out any upgrade in a test environment first to make sure it will work correctly. And prior to upgrading production always make a backup and don't rely upon the one that Confluence creates.

[David FALLAS]

Hello Davin, thank you for your comments. We don't have an issue with the TCP port as we just use the default - however I do have to edit server.xml to set Context/path="/confluence" at each upgrade. v5.7 was the default offering on the Atlassian Downloads page, so as that did not signal a major version change, I just downloaded what was on offer. I know that a trial upgrade is always recommended, but we are not a big shop and don't really have spare servers to play around with. Besides, the real question is why did the v5.7 upgrade fail to register the Windows service correctly? One of the prime reasons for my putting up this question in the first place is that others may find the same problem. I will attempt the exercise again but with v5.6.6 - not 5.7.