Jira admin restricted from creating a project or viewing portal settings of existing projects

[Sri Ved]

Did anyone experience the following issue with your service desk, after upgrading to 4.5.1?

I am a Jira admin for my service desk installation (starter license) and recently upgraded Service Desk from 4.3 to 4.5.1 (Jira to 8.5.1).

Since then, I've been having issues. First it caused issues with number of users assigned the Service Desk application access. That was fixed by advice in another thread.

Now:

1. It is not letting me view/edit portal settings of an existing project (that worked without issues in the past). Gives me the error: "SNAP, you can't view this page" in the page title bar.
2. It is not letting customers login. It allows the first customer to login and auto-assigns a service desk license and takes the customer straight to project (instead of portal). We are two admins on this and one customer fills up the agent limit and no one else is allowed to login.
3. It is not even letting me (or the other admin) to create new projects. When we try, we get the error: "Hmm... we couldn't create your project due to an unknown error. Try refreshing the page to start again."

The error in catalina.out for the last issue reads: (edited to hide actual URL):

13-Nov-2019 15:55:51.013 WARNING [http-nio-8080-exec-21] com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.WebComponent.filterFormParameters A servlet request, to the URI https://<our_service_desk_installation>.com/rest/project-templates/1.0/templates, contains form parameters in the request body but the request body has been consumed by the servlet or a servlet filter accessing the request parameters. Only resource methods using @FormParam will work as expected. Resource methods consuming the request body by other means will not work as expected.

Any clues anyone? I cannot ask Atlassian since they don't support Starter licenses.
 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Sri,

Sorry to hear about this problem.  It seems clear to me from the description here that Service Desk plugin has not started up correctly here.  This could prevent the upgrade of Service Desk data, as well as prevent the customer portal from loading at all.

But I am unaware of any known problems specifically about the versions you have upgraded to and from here.  I would be interested to see if you can try something as a means to see if this helps resolve the problem:

1. Stop Jira
2. Go into your $JIRAHOME/plugins/installed-plugins folder, leave this folder in place, but move all the contents to a temp folder outside the $JIRAHOME
3. Run the following SQL command against the Jira database

   truncate table pluginstate;

4. Start Jira
5. Go to the Gear Icon -> Applications -> Versions & Licenses, from this page reinstall the Jira Service Desk application. 

These steps will start up your Jira instance without any additional plugins/add-ons, which includes Jira Service Desk and Jira Software.  Also by clearing that specific table, it removes any database flags that might exist that could have disabled plugin(s) in your system.  Sometimes a single plugin that is required for Service Desk to start up could be disabled on a database level (either by administrator choice or by failed startup).

These steps can at least test against my hunch here that you have a failed plugin keeping Service Desk from working as designed here.  If Service Desk starts working correctly, you can then reinstall the other plugins needed here.  I would suggest trying to use the UPM in Jira directly so that you can install them via the marketplace, this can help to prevent you from installing plugin versions that might not be compatible with your newer Jira version here.

If that doesn't work, or you simply don't want to try this approach, then I would be more interested to see if we can take a look at a support zip from this Jira site to better understand the potential causes of this problem.   I suspect we will see a problem of some kind starting the Service Desk plugins.  You could upload this support zip to a service like google drive or dropbox and then share that link with us here.  I'm afraid that our Community site does not yet permit file attachments aside from images.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this.

Andy

[Andy Heinzer]

Just as a side note, the error message you posted is actually not related at all to this problem with Service Desk.  That warning message is a very common extraneous warning message that every Jira Server site throws.  We have a request to reduce these kinds of messages from the logging in JRASERVER-30406.