Fisheye reports JIRA "seems to be offline".

[Dave]

I am trying to connect a new instance of Fisheye 2.10.2 to JIRA 5.2. Both of these servers have an HTTPS reverse proxy in front of them like this:

Fisheye: https://intranet.example.com/source

JIRA: https://intranet.example.com/issues

Yes, it is a self-signed certificate, but I've used keytool to add the root CA cert to the key store on both servers and have tested it via Java SSLPoke to make sure everythings works. In fact, both of these servers use the same certificate to successfully get to our LDAPS server. So I don't think it is a cert issue.

However, the reverse proxy server (intranet.example.com) also uses HTTP Basic authentication. We have created a user specifically for these two systems to communicate and have also tested logging in via that user/password via the "lynx" command line browser to ensure there are no firewall issues.

I've followed the procedure to link the applications starting on the Fisheye side. When I initially create the link in Fisheye using the "https://intranet.example.com/issues" URL it tells me that it can't recognize what type of server that is and I have to tell it manually that it is a JIRA server. That seemed wrong to me right off the bat, but at the same time unless it also asks me for basic authentication credentials (which it doesnt), I don't know how it could even reach that server. So I save the application link anyway and later configured the basic auth credentials under "outgoing authentication" -- but still is reports that the server seems offline.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Dave · Accepted solution]

It turns our the real problem was our use of Basic Authentication...which is not supported for use between Atlassian app-linked servers and will likely never be supported:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-23997?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel

The workaround was to modify the location access rules in the Apache reverse proxy to allow the Atlassian servers through without basic authentication.

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all

Allow from 192.168.42.74

Allow from 192.168.42.77

Allow from 192.168.42.78

Satisfy Any

Now everything works like a charm.

Note that an alternative solution would have been to open a second HTTP port connection for each server (like a back door) and use those LAN addresses. This actually worked for linking to JIRA and Confluence because they run in Tomcat and I could easily make the required changes to server.xml. However, Fisheye runs in an embedded Jetty container and I could not find a way to have both the http and https-proxy connections open at the same time.