How to access setup when localhost is not available

[James Golden]

So, I am attempting a setup of Confluence on linux.  Unfortunately it seems the documentation is not only confusing, but conflicting as well.

So I setup the install using the "best practice" instructions on Linux.  However, I do not have a GUI installed on the Ubuntu server.  So I can't access the initial setup page using localhost.

I went and changed the server.xml to change it using the "<Host name="... settings to the server name I wanted.  I made a dns entry.  However, when I attempt to access it at http://servername.domain.com:8090 I just get a time out.

Also, setting up this way doesn't appear to give me any logs either.  How in the world am I supposed to know what is going on?  Is it even running?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There's a simple check for what is running - try, on the server, curl localhost or wget localhost.  That should get you an html file which is what a browser would render if it could connect.  If that does not give you a setup page, it should give you an error message to work with.

Also, you do have logs - confluence-home/log is the place to look.  If there's nothing in there, then the application isn't even starting, and you'll want to look in confluence-install/logs to see why Tomcat can't start it.

[James Golden]

Thanks nic for that info.  It helped, a lot!  I am making progress...

I was able to discover that it was not running.  So I logged in as the dedicated user and ran the script manually.  That did get the tomcat server running.  I was able to work through the errors I found in the logs.

Now when I use the wget it shows it is connecting.  So how do I get it to respond on another host name other than localhost?

I changed the server.xml (2 variables there), and when I do a wget from the server using localhost or the new host name it responds.  However do this from another machine and I get a connection timed out.  Any ideas?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Keep it simple on the next step - don't change the settings initially, you know it's on (say) localhost:8080, so , from a remote machine, try <ip address of server>:8080 - what does that do?

[James Golden]

Figured it out.  Discovered UFW was installed and blocking port 8090.  Added a new rule and bam!  I would have posted sooner, but I don't have enough upvotes to post for 24 hours.  lol.

Thanks again Nic!