Not able to access production instance of Confluence Server (Data Centre)

[Nigel Eaton]

We are running Confluence 6.14.3 Confluence (Data Center)  with MySQL 8.0.3 on a Linux centos7 server in both a Test and a Production Environment. We recently applied Linux OS and MySQL patches to this server. Since the update, we are experiencing the following when attempting to access confluence on the Production Environment:

"Confluence had problems starting up

This page is for Confluence administrators. If you're seeing this page, your Confluence administrator is probably working to restore the service.

Confluence encountered the following problems during startup. You need to fix any errors before you start Confluence again.

Database: The database collation 'utf8mb3_bin' is not supported by Confluence. You need to use 'utf8_bin'.

Learn more

 "

We are not experiencing this issue with the Test environment.

We have since rolled back the application RPMs on the production server however but the previous MySQL patches have not been preserved and so we are unable to roll them back.

I am considering updating to Confluence 6.14.3 as recommended on the “Plan your upgrade” tool. However I am unable to access this tool on the production environment due to the above issue.

The pre-upgrade checks on the test environment advise the following:

1. Complete pre-upgrade checks

We've analyzed your instance, and here's what we found:

Your current Java platform won't be supported. Learn more

We recommend that you fix these for a successful upgrade.

I would like information regarding how we can be confident that we can achieve a successful upgrade without having access to the “Plan your upgrade” tool due to the fact that we do not have access to the Web interface.

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ · Accepted solution]

For one, you should really NOT have a productive Confluence Environment run on version 6.x after all the recent Security Advisories AND post about it.

Have a look here: CVE-2023-22522 - RCE Vulnerability In Confluence Data Center and Confluence Server | Atlassian Support | Atlassian Documentation

The error is fairly simple and just like the message says. You need to change the collation of your database to utf8_bin. See here: mysql - How to change the CHARACTER SET (and COLLATION) throughout a database? - Stack Overflow

Probably something to do with the MySQL Update. I had similar issues before. It could be, that the test environment had a different Collation than prod but with older versions it wasn't an issue? I couldn't really find a reason either, but changing it worked for me.