Best way to setup Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Fisheye, etc

[lance_lyons]

We are moving from Teamcity and Axosoft to the suite of Jira products. We were going to use TFS and had a very powerful box for this. The server is a 2 processor Xeon x5670 2.93Ghz with 24gb memory, 64 bit Windows 2008 R2 with a 140gb os partitiion and 1.6 Tb data drive. We also have a dedicated MS SQL 2008 box for databases.

For our evaluation we setup Jira, Bamboo, Confluence, Fisheye/Crucible on the same machine with different ports.

http://machinename:8083 (Confluence as a windows service)

http://machinename:8084 (Bamboo build server)

http://machinename:8085 (Jira)

http://machinename:8060 (crucible/fisheye)

All have been configured with the DB's externally on the dedicated sql box.

I have a several questions related to this.

1. Are we ok with having all of these on the same high performance box for a group of 100-125 users ( 30 developers)

2. Was thinking of coming up with clean names like jira.ourdomain.com, confluence.ourdomain.com and have our F5 handle https to http for these sites. Not sure about the management/ other ports like 8000, 8443 (jira),8059(fisheye) when we do this.

Currently we have evaluations setup for all of these but they are working well. We have full copy registration keys coming soon.

3. Is it easy enough to rename the sites from http://machinename to http://urlname or http://anothermachinename ?

4. Will we be able to enter the registration keys without having to reinstall?

I know this was a busy question but any help/guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

Lance

[Radu Dumitriu]

2 cents: Add crowd for SSO, place an apache in front of it.

1. i think yes

2 & 3. see above

4 yes

[Jeremy Largman]

I agree. To clarify the "place apache in front", you'll want to add mod_proxy to change your URLs so you have something nice like www.mydomainname.com/confluence or confluence.mydomainname.com. See http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Running+Confluence+behind+Apache for the Confluence example.

[lance_lyons]

ok so that sounds reasonable. IN this scenario do we also run the other apps sites behind this same apache/crowd instance?

www.mydomainname.com/jira

www.mydomainname.com/crucible

www.mydomainname.com/bamboo

[lance_lyons]

also when you do this with Crowd is that an additional cost for crowd licenses per the number of users you have?

[Jeremy Largman]

Yes, you can run other apps the same way. Apache will simply redirect to a different URL.

[lance_lyons]

It seems like the integrating crowd into apache and then doing the mod_proxy approach looks good but we are not able to integrate crowd with apache with the current atlassian instructions. It recommends using activePerl 5.8 or 5.10 to setup the crowd apache connectors but neither of those activePerl versions are available. I tried to do this with activePerl 5.12 but got some errors and the crowd connector download only supports 5.8 and 5.10.

Any other thoughts?

[lance_lyons]

Hi TOm, It was all related to costs. Both products seem to be difficult and cumbersome to configure all the components to behave nicely with each other.

[Tom Moors]

Hi Lance,

I hope you are at the moment enjoying every minute of the Atlassian suite!
It seems to me that you are developing in .net because of the initial choice of TFS. May I ask you what the main reasons were to change the choice to the Atlassian tools? Thnx!

[Clifford Holden]

I can provide my recent experience:

We had set up our instance in the exact same way as you describe. I found that if you had multiple clients up at the same time (e.g. Confluence and Jira), you would get randomly logged off. This was due to the application cookies for each session being stepped on by the other session. What we did is simply use our DNS to alias the server name to names like "jira" and "confluence". This stopped the logoff problem, and has been working well for about a month now. A minor annoyance is that we still have to indicate the port number, so that

machinename:8080

became

jira:8080

I had tried following the instructions for altering the configuration of apache to do port forwarding, so you don't need to specify the port number, but I ran into several problems. I'm not a full time IT person, so I didn't want to spend a lot of time trying to fix this.

BTW, we are running this on a quad CPU server running Ubuntu 11.10. Generally seems to work OK, and we have installed Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Fisheye, and Crucible.

[lance_lyons]

Hi Clifford, Thanks for the information. I just submitted a question on answers where we are occassionally having to log back in on a jira page that should be allowed because of the intial login. I am guessing we could be having they same issue where we are getting randomly logged off.

I am a little confused about what you mean by other application cookies causing issues. We access our sites a Jira.domainname, confluence.domainname, bamboo.domainname, crucible.domainname, etc. All of the sites reside on the same server except Crucible (we moved this over to our SVN server to improve performance). We are using dedicated IP address for each site on the server but we also are using reverse proxy in apache to route to ipaddress:port.

Can you explain what you saw with the application cookies stepping on each other?

Thanks

[Clifford Holden]

My situation was a bit different. I was using the same server name (svn01) for all applications.

What I understand the situation to be is this: session cookies for the same server (if it's an IP address or a name) are the same regardless of the port used. You also need to set the default address in each of the applications to the same name (this is in the admin configuration page).

What I saw with the cookie clobbering was that, for example, I'm editing a page in confluence, but when I try to save the page the login prompt appears, and all of my data is lost. This, along with the configuration I provided, caused the Atlassian support to indicate that the cookie clobbering was indeed what was happening. When we did the DNS switch, this behavior was eliminated.

Hope this helps.