Invalid Login Error and no sync with Azure Active Directory

[Saxess Software GmbH]

I had this problem solved in april and now is it back. The old thread was:https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Crowd-questions/Log-in-to-crowd-console-gt-Invalid-login/qaq-p/783269#M3180

Invalid Login and no sync with Azure Active Directory. Now with Crowd Version 3.2.1 and Java 1.8.0_172. A reinstall (with the same ApplicationData-Directory) was not successful.

In Logfiles are in
-..\apache-tomcat\logs\catalina.2018-05-30.log -> 0 Errors
-..\apache-tomcat\logs\crowd-stderr.2018-05-30.log -> 0 Errors
-..\apache-tomcat\logs\crowd-stdout.2018-05-30.log -> 2 Errors:

2018-05-30 11:24:37,732 localhost-startStop-1 WARN [tool.schema.internal.ExceptionHandlerLoggedImpl] GenerationTarget encountered exception accepting command : Error executing DDL via JDBC Statement

2018-05-30 11:51:40,940 Caesium-2-1 ERROR [atlassian.crowd.directory.DbCachingDirectoryPoller] Error occurred while refreshing the cache for directory [ 622593 ].

Have you an idea, what is to do?

System is:
Crowd 3.2.1
MS Windows 2016 Server Datacenter in Azure VM
Azure SQL DB
Java jdk and jre 1.8.0_172

[Saxess Software GmbH]

Ok, the three solutions were:

• "Invalid Login" - Chrome Browser caching problem -> delete all temp files or use another Browser
• "Error executing DDL via JDBC Statement" ...
  • Crowd doesnt worked with Azure SQL DB
  • Crowd doesnt worked with SQL Server 2016 Express -> maybe also with no other ... Express Version(this should be written explicit on Crowd system requirement page like on Jira system requirement page)
  • have then used Postgresql 9.6.x -> this worked
• "Error occurred while refreshing the cache for directory ... Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence" ...

  • Modified the value of the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Apache Software Foundation\Procrun 2.0\Crowd\Parameters\Java
    change last line from "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" to "-Dfile.encoding=UTF8"

  • restart the service 

This has taken some hours of tests, trial and error. 

[Bruno Vincent]

@Saxess Software GmbH

Wow... great work! How did you find the UTF8 one?!

[Saxess Software GmbH]

We had help from an experienced polish Atlassian Partner, who has created a similar system to reproduce the failure. The error was reproducable and then they worked with java stack traces to delimit the error-cause. They could find and fix it. 

The problem could be occur on some other installations with crowd+azure directory since crowd version 3.1.1 - 3.2.1.

[Bruno Vincent]

Hello @Saxess Software GmbH

For what it's worth, I've noticed that as of today Azure SQL does NOT belong to the list of supported databases for Crowd, whereas it is explicitly listed as supported for Jira and Confluence. Maybe Azure SQL is not supported at this time, that could explain the JDBC error you get.

[Saxess Software GmbH]

Hello Bruno,

thank you for this note, this could be the point. There is a list with incompatibilities between MS SQL Server and Azure SQL DB from Microsoft. We have thought, its full compatible. 

Best Regards

Lars