Assistance reviving confluence evaluation
Asked by Craig Van Der Valk:

Hi,

For starters please let me know if this is not the best forum for this request.

I've been evaluating confluence with great success until it inexplicably stopped working and none of my troubleshooting efforts so far have bourne fruit.

Attempting to reach confluence on port 8090 gives me HTTP Status 500's from a errors.jsp page and not very informative "root causes".

A summary of the infrastructure I am using;

Oracle Linux 5.7

Oracle Database 11.2

Users successfully authenticating via our Microsoft AD

I'll await feedback on the first concern above before continuing to add detail.

Regards.


Answers:
author: jing_hwa_cheok
body: Hi Craig,

As you know, HTTP Status 500 is very vague error that doesn't tell us much. Try to tail \<confluence-install\>/logs/catalina.out and \<confluence-data\>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log file then replicate the issue. That should give us some clue.

Kind Regards,

Jing Hwa

comments: author: Craig Van Der Valk
body: Hi Jing,

From what I can tell it appears to be an file/software ownership issue.

Firstly, confluence had been working as a fresh install for about 1 week, and I believe it is installed as per the install doco. I accept I may have missed something but would be surprised that it took this long to for any mistep to rear its head in the form of such errors.

To upload the copious amounts of information from the two log files you refer to would be messy, but can be done if you really really want. For the sake of brevity I'll try to only post what is relevant.

When I bounced confluence with "service confluence stop" and "service confluence start" I noted the following in the catalina.out file;

java.io.FileNotFoundException: /var/atlassian/application-data/confluence/logs/atlassian-confluence.log (Permission denied)

NB. Nothing at all apeared in the atlassian-confluence.log file.

I changed the ownership of that file just to see what would happen and although there was some progress the end result of the web service at port 8090 was the same. There was some additional output in the atlassian-confluence.log file this time however. Regardless ther were some additional messages about file permissions in the atlassian-confluence.log file.

I have seen similar messages in logs of other webapps I have used and a common problem is "somebody started the webapp as root".

I noted that the/etc/init.d/confluence service script must be run as root however the version configured by the installer does not "su" as the confluence user, however I have not investigated the child scripts yet to determine the ownership flow, but suffice to say the evidence does point to a possible problem here.

I noted the article;

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Start+Confluence+Automatically+on+Linux>

which seems somewhat woefully out of date (still pointing to java 1.5) and noted that it does "su" as confluence but points to different start/stop scripts than the version I am evaluating.

Anyway Jing I'm prepared to keep plugging away to find a root cause and any assistance from yourself or others at Atlassian would be appreciated.

Regards


author: jing_hwa_cheok
body: Hi Craig,

It does seem like a permission issue. Try to check the permission for all the file in the Confluence data folder (var/atlassian/application-data/)

```
ls -al
```

After that, assign the permission to the appropriate if needed

```
chown -R user /path/to/dir
```

Regards,

Jing Hwa


author: Craig Van Der Valk
body: Hi Jing,

I've reread the install doco and I believe there is nothing for or against installing confluence as root or otherwise, on linux.

I recall I installed as root, which as per the doco, has created a confluence user account to run the application. I'm reluctant to go about changing the ownership on entire directory trees in an ad-hoc fashion unless you/Atlassian can point me towards a confluence knowledge-base article or similar. Alternatively I can assist a more in-depth analysis by providing more log data and such.

If I had a paid for confluence license I'd currently be in a lot of strife. Suffice to say the evaluation has hit a snag and its not looking good for confluence...

Regards, Craig


author: Craig Van Der Valk
body: Should I raise a support issue for the evaluation?


author: jing_hwa_cheok
body: I believe you should raise a support ticket for this issue in our [Support Channel](https://support.atlassian.com). We will continue the investigation over there.


author: Craig Van Der Valk
body: Thanks Jing!


author: Craig Van Der Valk
body: See <https://support.atlassian.com/browse/CSP-107679>


Tags: confluence-administration