Upgrading from 6.4.14 to 7.0.11 will not work

[Thomas Hardin]

We need help....

We have been working to migrate and upgrade one of our business unit's Jira instance over to our corporate instance, however; we cannot seem to get past the upgrade from 6.4.14 to 7.0.11. 

Our path has been 6.4.11 > 6.1.14 > 7.0.11 > 7.3.3 > 7.6.1. We are moving from an old Windows 2007 machine to an Azure Windows 2012 VM.

We can successfully migrate the instance in 6.4.11 by taking a backup and restoring it on the new box. This includes installing all identical version of the plugins. Then, we upgrade all plugins to the latest possible version given the instance (6.4.11). We then upgrade to 6.4.14. From there, we have done all of the follow with no luck:

1. Enter Safe Mode and upgrade
2. No Safe Mode and upgrade
3. Uninstall all after market plugins and upgrade
4. Enabled all plugins in the DB (postgres 9.4)

All upgrade attempts appear to work perfectly, but when we execute the start up, we get the dreaded 500 error. We must be doing something wrong. What, we have no idea.

Has anyone encountered issues where the upgrade appears to go well , but you can not get Jira restarted?

Is it possible that the issue is with Windows? We'd reach out to Atlassian, but the service contract ended last week and we only need to migrate this to our corporate instance.

I've enclosed the log files and welcome any assistance.

[AhmadDanial · Accepted solution]

Hello, Thomas.

As of now, it is pretty difficult to specifically tell what causes the 500 error on your migrated JIRA instance (currently at 6.4.14) as there are no screen shots and log snippets available on the question. Since you mentioned that the log files were enclosed, I suspect that it was not attached here properly.

• Is it possible for you to provide those information here so we can have a clearer view on this?
• Which upgrade method did you choose when the upgrade was performed?
• Were you able to log in to the instance or it just shows the 500 error when you try to open the instance from the browser?

For your additional information, we have a Jira Software upgrade checklist that can also help to determine the steps to upgrade JIRA effectively. Looking forward to hear from you.

[Thomas Hardin]

Hello @AhmadDanial, 

My apologies for not enclosing the logs, but I did finally figure out the issue. After uninstalling all plugins, there were only a few left and after finding a post, I learned the the jira-calendar-plugin-2.1.11.jar was the culprit. Once I removed it from the installed plugins directory, the application started successfully. 

Sadly, this took over 2 weeks to figure out and now I have to go through the entire process again as this was only a test run. Now, we have to perform a full migration and upgrade. 

What you may be able to help with is to let me know if you think I should uninstall all of the marketplace plugins between 6.4.14 and 7.0.11. Or, do you think that Atlassian certified plugins would be fine to leave. Additionally, if you have other tips, I'b be very grateful.

[AhmadDanial]

Hi there, Thomas.

No worries. I am glad that you were able to have the problem figured out on your end. Since you mentioned that the root cause was related to the JIRA Calendar Plugin, I took a look at the version history of the add-on in the marketplace here and it shows that the version that you are on (2.1.11) is supported in 6.4.14. So, I do wonder why the plugin contributed to the issue:

Since you mentioned that you found a post related to it, can you share it here? I just want to make sure that the issue was indeed caused by the JIRA calendar plugin and not other plugins instead.

I would still be interested to go through the logs to dig deeper into this. Please let me know if that is fine with you so I can go ahead and raise a support ticket to the JIRA team for further assistance.

While I think that it is perfectly fine to leave the plugins intact as long as it is supported by us, I recommend you to have a look at the Upgrading JIRA from 6.x to 7.x article shared by Brian Jones for some best practices on the upgrade process.

[Thomas Hardin]

The issue occurred with the upgrade to 7.0.11 and the attempted restart. You're right, it did not effect 6.4.14. As for logs, I cleared everything out (stupidly) as we needed to reset the 6.4.11 version to run dual environments until the official cut over for this business unit.

What I can do is maintain the logs when I upgrade again and start the application back up with the plugin installed. Then, I can remove it and restart to catch the activity.

And, funny that you would mention Brian as he and I are working together. We discussed this, but he has been away on vacation. Small world. 

Thank you for you assistance on this.

[AhmadDanial]

Hello, Thomas.

You are always welcome. That sounds like a good plan. Feel free to revisit this back when you have the information that we can utilize to move forward.

Small world indeed! Please say hello to him when he is back. Hear from you soon.