Upgrading Jira from 6.3.4 to 7.0.* - I would like to know some best practices for LDAP connectivity , impacts and problems faced.

[Vickey Lepcha]

Upgrading Jira from 6.3.4 to 7.0.*   - I would like to know some best practices for LDAP connectivity , impacts and problems faced.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Best practice is simple - set up a new JIRA, connect it to LDAP and test it thoroughly.

As for impacts and problems, "how long is a piece of string".  I've seen all sorts of things happen with LDAP connections, and never the same thing twice on different client sites (except when it works fine, that happens a lot).  We can't even begin to tell you about those without writing a medium-sized text book.  Most of the book will be utterly irrelevant to you, and 99% of the rest you will find in testing which you need to do anyway.

[Jonas Andersson]

I second every word written by Nic here, this is truly a case-to-case thing that might be the simples thing in the world, or turn ugly very fast.

I upgraded from 6.2.1 to 7.0.x and one of the main things you should keep an eye on are plugins that no longer compatible with the newer version, as this might stop the instance from coming back up. In my case i had to drop a plugin (both in the PLUGINDATA mysql table, and on the filesystem). Other than this, my upgrade went fine.

During the upgrade it gives you an URL that should allow you to disable or removed plugins no longer working, but i never managed to use that as the server never came back up.

As usual make sure you have proper backups of database and filesystem to allow a speedy restore. If the JIRA instance is running on a VM, take some time to clone the instance, shut down the original, boot the clone and attempt the upgrade there to make sure you can just turn of the server and boot the original one if everything fails.

IF you are using an external database server it gets a bit trickier, but nothing that proper full database backups can't recover you from.

LDAP worked straight out of the box after upgrading, and when comparing to older version of JIRA, Atlassian has come a long way from what an upgrade used to be.

Come to think of it, one thing annoyed the hell out of me.

The upgrade will re-write you conf/server.xml, and bin/setenv.sh AND cacerts file with default one's

server.xml changed all the connectors i had for alternative port numbers.

cacerts was replaced with atlassians own, making me lose all imported certificates

setenv.sh had all references to the keystore and other tweaks removed.

Back up all these files might save you from a few pitfalls.