JIRA Upgrade 8.6.1 to 8.18.1. Will not start FATAL : Startup check failed. Jira will be locked.

[geoffbland]

I have upgraded from JIRA 8.6.1 to 8.18.1 and now JIRA will not start up.

I followed the normal installation instructions from the atlassian-jira-core-8.18.1-x64.bin file and this gave no errors. Previous similar upgrades have worked fine.

The only error I have is the following in catalina.out 

2021-07-28 19:12:45,322+0100 JIRA-Bootstrap FATAL [c.a.jira.startup.JiraStartupLogger] Startup check failed. Jira will be locked.

No other log files show any errors. I do have a warning about not using SSL for MySQL connection but I am pretty sure this was present before the upgrade and is not the problem.

This is running on Lubuntu 18.04LTS, using a MySQL database with the mysql driver mysql-connector-java-5.1.46-bin.jar installed in the lib directory.

What can I do to investigate and resolve this issue?

[geoffbland]

Update - I rolled back to 8.6.1 and all is working again now.

I would like to upgrade to 8.18,1 if possible but with it failing with just that FATAL error message with no clue what the actual issue is - it makes it rather impossible.