Why am I getting base URL warnings in JIRA after upgrade? Settings appear to be correct.

[Paul Zurlinden]

Scenario

• Running JIRA Core and Confluence behind Apache reverse proxy - all was fine prior to upgrade.
• Just upgraded JIRA from server 7.3 to 7.8. 
• Have not updated Confluence - currently running 6.2.1.

Upgrade Process

• I read all release notes and followed all upgrade notes for each version from 7.3 and up.  
• Ran plugin upgrade check prior to upgrade, consequently disabled 3 plugins prior to upgrade.
  • Universal Plugin Manager
  • Support Tools Plugin
  • World time plugin for JIRA (this was inconsequential anyway, and have since uninstalled)
• Ran upgrade installation for 7.8 - did not run individual upgrades for 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, or 7.7
• Reconfigured the JIRA server.xml according to documentation in order for Apache to function correctly
• After upgrade was complete, checked plugins and found the following were automatically enabled via upgrade process (though I manually disabled prior to upgrade)
  • Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools (presumably newer version of what was "Support Tools Plugin")
  • Atlassian Universal Plugin Manager Plugin

Symptoms

• System runs, data can be accessed, however VERY sluggish
• Several gadgets that had worked not longer work
  • Confluence Page Gadget
  • JIRA Issues Calendar (based on JIRA Calendar Plugin)
  • Activity Stream
• In Mange add-ons screen (nowhere else) have warning: "The base URL configuration of your instance does not match the URL in your browser. This can prevent operations on this page from working correctly. See UPM documentation for more details about this error."

Action Taken

• When looking at General configuration / Base URL, actual setting matches that of the JIRA server.xml file, as well as the browser url.
• Tried following troubleshooting documentation but could not find what to do when the Base URL setting is in fact correct...

[Andy Heinzer]

Are you using SSL with Jira?

If so, is this terminated in Apache?

I understand you seems to have Apache functioning as a reverse proxy, but the other concern I have is to understand if your environment has an outbound proxy.  If the server running Jira has to use this proxy in order to make outbound http or https requests, it could generate an error like this.  How to Configure an Outbound HTTP and HTTPS Proxy for JIRA applications has steps on how to configure Jira for this kind of network.  

These settings are stored in the $JIRAINSTALL/bin/setenv.sh file.  It is possible that an upgrade might have overwritten this file, which is why this has suddenly happened.  Additionally I think this is most likely, because if this file was overwritten, you would also be reverted to the default memory allocations of Jira (768m).   If you have a lot of issues in Jira you probably have already walked through Increasing Jira memory, to bump this to help performance.   It is possible you might have to repeat those steps here if that file was overwritten during the upgrade.

If that isn't the problem here, then let me explain some more details of why this can happen:

So Jira has to be able to reach its own base URL in order for things like the dashboard gadgets to work and for the UPM to function properly.  It sounds like external users can reach the Jira site, but in cases like this we need to make sure that the Jira server itself can reach that base URL successfully.  Using a reverse proxy makes this more complicated, as does SSL.  But it might also help to try to recreate this problem once more, and then take a quick peak at the $JIRAHOME/log/atlassian-jira.log file.  Sometimes the errors here can be helpful to understand what the problem here is.

It might also help to walk through the KB How to fix gadget titles showing as __MSG_gadget.  I suspect you might be seeing the same symptoms as this KB and it might help to see the possible causes and solution here.

[Paul Zurlinden]

Thanks for all of the things to look at!  I've gone through all items you've mentioned, some things have worked, some haven't...

I'm not using SSL, so I don't believe this needs to be addressed.

Outbound proxy for Apache is working, and the steps outlined in the configuration guideline were done when I had initially installed Apache.  I've reviewed them again, since upgrading, and settings were not changed.  I'm not exactly sure how to check if the apps can talk through it though.

Honestly I had never changed JVM memory from original installation.  I did however address this and increased the memory to 1 GB.  When looking at System info now, I'm using less than 50%.

I had also not seen the __MSG_gadget error, but when reviewing the documents to see if their were any useful tips I noticed that my Application Link had been broken from Confluence to JIRA (JIRA to Confluence was still intact).  When I could not restore the link - even after deleting and recreating, and following the troubleshooting guide - I decided that I would try to bypass the proxy.  It was only after bypassing the proxy that I saw the __MSG_gadget error!  However, bypassing the proxy did resolve the Application Link... 

So now, in order to resolve the __MSG_gadget error, I have differing application links as follows:

• JIRA -> Confluence: http://confluenceapp.mydomain.com
• Confluence -> JIRA: http://localhost:8081 (where I created port 8081 in server.xml)

All of this and...

• both applications "work"
• Application links work
• I have sufficient JVM memory
• I no longer have "base URL" warnings
• I don't have __MSG_gadget errors
• My gadgets still don't work.

Any further thoughts or tips would be appreciated! -Thanks