Jira Service Desk customer portal intermittently loads a blank page

[Chris Murphy]

Intermittently some clients in our organization will get a completely blank page when they attempt to load our Service Desk portal. We've done a lot of research and troubleshooting that I won't get in to as I believe we've finally managed to determine the cause, but actually discerning how to fix it is giving us some grief. One quick thing worth mentioning is that we've been using Service Desk for about a year, and this only started happening after we upgraded from a 3.x.x version of Service Desk to 4.1.0.

After generating a HAR file when a user's service desk portal fails to load and comparing it to one that successfully loads, we've noticed in the failed HAR filethat we receive a "401" error response for a specific POST request, and then nothing further is generated in the HAR. In the HAR file for the successful load, the same POST request provides a successful "200" response, and then more POST and GET requests occur until the page successfully loads.

The 401 error that occurs is always for the following URL:
POST https://jiraurl.com:9999/rest/webResources/1.0/resources


We've found this Atlassian article that may be relevant, but we're not exactly sure how to go about applying/testing any possible changes from it:
https://developer.atlassian.com/server/framework/atlassian-sdk/rest-and-os-authtype/

Any further information needed for help/suggestions can be provided, although I'd prefer not to share the HAR files publicly for security reasons.

Thanks for the help!

[Danyal Iqbal]

It simply means that the page you requested requires authentication and you did not provide any creds.

check the webserver (tomcat /catalina logs. 401 is a unauthorised code. ) you should find a detailed error message there. If not, check if there is a proxy server between the client and the server? check the proxy logs. IIS is known to misbehave with 401 codes (authentication handshakes reset over TCP pipe)

[Chris Murphy]

Thanks for the response!

We'd actually theorized that it does have to do with authentication, but in saying that, we have tried ensuring that users are logged in to Jira and connecting to the portal again, but it doesn't always resolve the issue, and sometimes users are actually already signed in.

In recent memory, we've had one case where getting the user to log in fixed the issue, one case where the user was already logged in and still getting the blank page, and one case where the user wasn't logged in but logging in did not resolve the issue.

I'd also assume that if the user wasn't authenticated, they'd simply receive the login prompt (like attached)?


The catalina log files contain this error and only this error (multiple times)
09-May-2019 09:44:38.880 WARNING [https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-21] com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.WebComponent.filterFormParameters A servlet request, to the URI https://jiraurl.com:9999/rest/webResources/1.0/resources, 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.

[Yuriy Lozhkin]

@Chris Murphy Hi! Could you please tell did you manage to solve this problem?

[Dave Hollinden]

@Yuriy Lozhkin We have not managed to solve this problem. For us, the problem is not limited to Service Desk portals, and affects non-JSD pages as well. I have an open ticket with Atlassian Support and we're engaged in troubleshooting. I'll report back here if we find out anything that could help others. 

I hope everyone is doing as well as possible in these troubled times. 

Dave

[Chris Murphy]

Nothing we actually tried solved this issue, unfortunately. It *seems* to have stopped occurring, but it could possibly be that my users have simply stopped reporting it.

[Dave Hollinden]

@Chris Murphy @Yuriy Lozhkin 

After working with Atlassian Support on this for a couple of months, we found that there's a JSD-SERVER ticket with regard to this problem. 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-6819

So this problem is known and acknowledged by Atlassian. There are two work-arounds, neither of which is very satisfying to me, but you might want to check them out. 

I hope everyone is doing well. 

Dave

[Mike Diehn]

The SDK section on REST and os_type tells us to expect 401 errors whenever the server is presented with an expired auth cookie or a request that lacks an auth cookie entirely - as when a requestor isn't logged in. Yet?

In September so far, I have 1,961 of 366,523 log entries for our Service Desk are 401s. All of them are for URI's starting with /rest. 1,206 are from my Jira and Confluence data center nodes asking about application links for users in our main Jira that don't aren't agents in Service Desk.

So, there are actually about 360 errors 401 going back to our Service Desk users and as far as I know, every time, logging in again has fixed the problem for them.

I wish or do I ever that I could make the Service Desk client code (in the browser) handle these better, but I can't.

Maybe Atlassian will someday. Do we have a bug report in to them about this yet?

[Anneta Svircenkova]

Hi Chris, 

Our customers face the same problem. User gets blank page in JSD with error 401 after POST request for the web resource https://<url>.com/rest/webResources/1.0/resources. We tried to investigate this problem, but so far, we do not have any solutions for this. The biggest problem that user gets this error intermittently so it is quite tricky to find out the circumstances that will always return such error.

Do you use any plugins? Have you tried to disable them and see if problem is still relevant? 

[Chris Murphy]

I've tried disabling all plugins before and see the same behaviour.

We've determined that having a user log in to JIRA and then reload the Service Desk portal will cause it to display correctly. The white page only happens intermittently when a user isn't logged in to JIRA.

Beyond that, I've still got no fix for this.

[Anneta Svircenkova]

It seems issue is fixed in Jira v8.5.1. Our company havent faced mentioned issue after  the upgrade. 

[Chris Murphy]

Awesome, that's great to know. Thanks for sharing :)

[Dave Hollinden]

We are having this error as well. Users started to report it after we upgraded from Jira v.7.13.8 to Jira v.8.5.3 in early March, but looking through our access logs I can see that it's been happening since October 2019, and I assume before that as well.

The most reliable fix for me has been to instruct the user to delete all cookies from the Jira instance. 

Dave

[Chris Murphy]

For anyone who happens to find this from a Google search and hopes to find an answer; we still have no solution to this, but the problem has been narrowed down and now only occurs when a user is not already logged in.

After disabling our instance's custom JIRA icon (for some reason this seems like it was causing permissions errors preventing people from loading the page sometimes), we found that this blank page *only* occurs when a user is not logged in to JIRA -- the expected result is a login page, but instead it's completely blank.