No spaces available after update to 5.8.13

[Jan-Peter Rusch]

After upgrading to Confluence 5.8.13 each login fails with "Currently no spaces available" and the login page.

[Jan-Peter Rusch]

As release notes cannot be commented anymore , I'll give some explanation here...

Atlassian upgraded the bundled Tomcat server to version 8.0.26 from 8.0.23 with Confluence 5.8.13.

This leads to a new handling of the parameter maxpostsize when using Tomcat with an AJP connector behind a frontend HTTP server.

Before Tomcat 8.0.24 maxpostsize = 0 meant, that POST request could send an infinite sized request. This was set in our environment. Starting with 8.0.24 the value 0 is handled as NO POST request size allowed. This is wrongfully handled by Confluence as an anonymous login. No message is logged in atlassian.log.

Setting maxpostsize to  -1 in server.xml and restart the Confluence server solves the issue.

A hint in the release notes for 5.8.13 on an upgraded Tomcat server would've solved the problem MUCH quicker...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Er, they don't need to mention it in the release notes because you don't need to change that setting to make it work. You just use the software as distributed. They can't write release notes to try to cover every single change you might have made after installation.

[Jan-Peter Rusch]

Nic, we're using Confluence according to: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/using-apache-with-mod_jk-173681.html in the official documentation. As they point out in the documentation, we're using this on our own risk. As we had problems with MAXPOSTSIZE default value, we set this value to 0 to allow unlimited POSTs. You might be right, that not every change must & should be commented in release notes, but just listing 9 bugs fixed or improved is sometimes not enough, when the underlying application server is updated. Anyway, I really appreciate running Conflunce on an up-to-date Tomcat...