Confluence stopped rendering dashboard after upgrade to server 6.13

[Dave Carlton]

I am going insane trying to figure this out. After upgrading from server 6.0.6 to 6.13.0 my instance will not render the pages correctly (see incorrect rendering).

However, if I use the local IP http://10.1.1.100:8090/confluence all is well (see correct rendering)

Thus, no one outside my LAN can view the pages correctly. Let me explain my setup.

After relocating to this new house my only viable choice was to use a Dynamic DNS name confluence.polymicro.net which points to my router IP. In the router I have port forwarding setup to send all 80, 8080, and 8090 requests to my server at 10.1.1.2. In the server apache configuration, I have proxy forwarding setup to send requests to confluence.polymicro.net over to 10.1.1.100:8090 and reverse proxy to send the URL back to the requestor.

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName confluence.polymicro.net
 ProxyPreserveHost On
 ProxyPass /confluence http://10.1.1.100:8090/confluence
 ProxyPassReverse /confluence http://confluence.polymicro.net/confluence
 # DumpIOInput On
 # DumpIOOutput On
 
 # LogLevel debug dumpio:trace7
 ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error-confluence.log
 CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access-confluence.log combined
 RewriteEngine on
 # LogLevel trace5
 # Redirect 301 / http://confluence.polymicro.net:8090
 # RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://confluence.polymicro.net:8090/confluence/$1
 # Redirect "^$" "http://confluence.polymicro.net/confluence"
 # Redirect "/" "http://confluence.polymicro.net/confluence"
</VirtualHost>

There is also a hairpin NAT configured to permit my LAN to access the instance using the DYNDNS name URL.

In essence a request to http://confluence.polymicro.net resolves the DNS to the IP of my router -> port 80 forwards -> 10.1.1.2 -> apache proxy passes the request to 10.1.1.100:8090.

I have spent 2 days on this and can't understand why this is all not working correctly when the old instance worked just fine. Why does a request using the LAN address cause rendering to work? What in the bowels of Confluence is depending on the URL request to render?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Dave Carlton · Accepted solution]

For reference to future visitors I found the problem was that the upgrade had overwritten a file install/server.xml and was missing the proxy connector I had setup previously. 

 <Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
 maxThreads="48" minSpareThreads="10"
 enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
 protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
 scheme="http" proxyName="confluence.polymicro.net" proxyPort="80"/>
 

And also the context path was missing.

 <Context path="/confluence" 

 Once those were corrected, the pages render correctly.

I wonder why an "upgrade" would not recognize a change to the configuration of the the previous version. I suppose the engineers get so wrapped up in their little world they fail to realize some of us do not wander into the bowels everyday and forget such changes are needed.

IMHO, critical files should be noted and at least recognized that changes are needed and inform the person doing the upgrade to check.