Last month I wrote that ‘JIRA 4 is coming to MRM London ‘real soon now’’ and I am pleased to report that although it took three attempts, ‘real soon’ is now. Despite extensive testing*, the upgrade did not work first time in our production environment. Specifically, the dashboard plug-in failed to initialise.

What we ended up having to do:

1. Roll-back to JIRA 3 
2. Upgrade server to Apache Tomcat 6.0 
3. Upgrade server to Java v1.6 
4. Upgrade Confluence to 3.2 to resolve dashboard initialisation issue
5. Upgrade to JIRA 4.11 
6. Upgrade SVN plug-in
7. Upgrade calendar plug-in
8. Reapply patch for MS-IE issue #JRA-8179 ‘Non-cache headers prevent viewing of attachments on Internet Explorer on https

The first couple of steps were suggested to us by Atlassian and certainly did not do any harm, but the Confluence upgrade proved crucial. In the live environment, we have JIRA and Confluence running on the same DNS name, putting them in the same Tomcat context. In the test environment, we have JIRA and Confluence running on different DNS names, putting them in different Tomcat contexts. We didn’t know this was significant; it is; now we know.

One day we will figure out what to do with the new-style administrator list page accessed via the ‘Contact administrators’ link in the standard page footer. ‘Here is an empty list of system administrators for this installation of JIRA.’ Doh!

Martin Cunnington, Production Director

* Terms and conditions apply … I guess you had to be there.