https access to JSS is blank after upgrade to 8.2.1

jkb
New Contributor III

Hello,

This is what I get for upgrading on a Friday afternoon.

I upgraded my JSS to 8.2.1 from 8.1. Now when I attempt to access the JSS via https://myjssname:8443 the site appears to load** but the page is blank. Happens no matter what machine I use to access the site via web. I thought for sure someone else had run into the same problem, but my search through the list archives was fruitless. Anyone have any suggestions?

thank you,
jkb

** n.b. the first time I attempted to load the page, I had to trust the self-signed cert, but subsequent loads go straight through to the site.
...
Jason Broccardo | AD/Controls Networking Group | jkb at fnal.gov | 630.840.8034

9 REPLIES 9

Matt
Valued Contributor

If this is on a Windows host clean out the Tomcat Cache in the Catalina folder.

jkb
New Contributor III
On Aug 12, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Matthew Lee wrote: If this is on a Windows host clean out the Tomcat Cache in the Catalina folder.

The JSS is a Mac OS X 10.6.8 Server

This is what I get for upgrading on a Friday afternoon. I upgraded my JSS to 8.2.1 from 8.1. Now when I attempt to access the JSS via https://myjssname:8443 the site appears to load** but the page is blank. Happens no matter what machine I use to access the site via web. I thought for sure someone else had run into the same problem, but my search through the list archives was fruitless. Anyone have any suggestions? thank you, jkb ** n.b. the first time I attempted to load the page, I had to trust the self-signed cert, but subsequent loads go straight through to the site.

thanks,
jkb
...
Jason Broccardo | AD/Controls Networking Group | jkb at fnal.gov | 630.840.8034

Not applicable

I had the same issue when I upgraded. I restored the tomcat directory (can't remember the exact path, but check /Library) from a backup and restarted tomcat to get it working.

jkb
New Contributor III

Thank you to Eric for the fix; this worked great.

Curious as to why it happened, as I had not disabled web or Tomcat services before upgrading, but copying the ROOT.war file worked like a charm.

jkb

I have seen this behavior if you have Tomcat stopped as you do the upgrade. If this is the case, the installer has a hard time determining if it should use the existing version of Tomcat or use the version that comes bundled with our installer. My guess is that the launchdaemon is loading our installed version of Tomcat but the web app got deployed to your existing version of Tomcat. The easiest fix is to look in /Library/Tomcat/webapps and copy the ROOT.war file to /Library/JSS/Tomcat/webapps. You should see the war auto deploy and create a ROOT directory, at that point you should be able to navigate to your JSS in a web browser.

Thanks,

Eric Krause
Product Specialist

eric.krause at jamfsoftware.com<mailto:eric.krause at jamfsoftware.com>
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JAMF Software
1011 Washington Ave. S
Suite 350
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Office: (612) 661-4658
Facsimile: (612) 332-9054
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US Support: (612) 216-1296
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donmontalvo
Esteemed Contributor III

Same problem when we tried to update 7.31 > 8.21. Luckily our Xserve LAB box has several partitions. So we cloned to a spare partition to test; didn't work so we went back to our normal day to day partition. I don't think we wiped the test partition yet, so when I get back to the LAB I'll see if this works and will shout back.

Thanks,
Don

Aaron a.robinson.lists at gmail.com

--
https://donmontalvo.com

Not applicable

Looking at the scripts in the JSS Installer.mpkg, I suspect the problem is a
conflict between how jss.pkg and tomcat.pkg are implementing the move to the
new Tomcat and LaunchDaemon locations.

Old:
Tomcat: /Library/Tomcat
LaunchDaemon: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist

New:
Tomcat: /Library/JSS/Tomcat
LaunchDaemon: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist.

Some relevant lines from the installer scripts:

In: JSS
Installer.mpkg/Contents/Packages/tomcat.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight
9: Statically sets $tomcatDirectory to /Library/JSS/Tomcat
34: Generates the keystore at: $tomcatDirectory/.keystore
61-65: Generates JSS init script at:
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist
64: Sets a few of the init script args using the $tomcatDirectory variable.

In: JSS
Installer.mpkg/Contents/Packages/jss.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight
9: Statically sets tomcatLaunchDaemon to
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist
17: pre82WebAppPresent is set to pre82WebAppAlreadyPresent
from /tmp/com.jamfsoftware.jssinstaller.plist
Note: The domain, pre82WebAppAlreadyPresent is set to YES (aka 1/TRUE) on
Line 63 of jss.pkg/Contents/Reource/preflight
when /Library/Tomcat/webapps/ROOT/bin/versions.txt exists and is a file.
54-57: If $pre82WebAppPresent == 1 it moves
/Library/JSS/Tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war to /Library/Tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war

TL;DR: If you had a previous version of the JSS installed, jss.pkg's
postflight script will move the compressed WAR that was just installed to
the new Tomcat location back to the old location. However, the script
doesn't seem to move the keystore and the LaunchDaemon is still pointing to
the new Tomcat location. That would explain why moving the war file to
/Library/JSS/Tomcat/webapps (the new location) would remedy the issue for
most people.

As a short-term quick-fix, you could probably get away with just removing
line 57 from jss.pkg's postflight script (haven't tested this). You'll
probably also want to remove the old LaunchDaemon plist (
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.jamfsoftware.tomcat.plist ) since the
installer appears to just unload it. Without the "-w" flag, the unload
won't persist across reboots.

Brandt

J. Brandt Buckley
Systems Integration Engineer
CRBS

brandt at ncmir.ucsd.edu http://crbs.ucsd.edu
P: +1 858 822 0743 F: +1 858 524 7497

Center for Research in Biological Systems
University of California, San Diego

Holly & Calit2
9500 Gilman Drive
Basic Science Building #1000
La Jolla, CA 92093-0608

russeller
Contributor III

I had the same issue with the blank screen after the JSS upgrade from 7.31 to 8.21. My JSS is also running on 10.6.8 Server. I've tried what was suggested in the thread, and the JSS starting working. Unfortunately, it only worked for about a day, and the issue started happening again... blank JSS screen. After rebooting the server it came back up. Must be a problem with the tomcat service, not the war files.

Has anyone else had Tomcat stop working after a day or so, and had to reboot or restart the service? Did you find a way to resolve this?

Steven Russell | Capistrano Unified School District | Technology Support Specialist

Matt
Valued Contributor

On my windows Box this happens everyday. Now I can't login to my JSS is saying Alerting Table Plugins :(
--
Matt Lee, CCA/ACMT/ACPT/ACDT
Senior IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group

bentoms
Release Candidate Programs Tester

I think the blank screen is due to tomcat memory.

Regards,

Ben.