Blank HTML on all confluence pages, when applied the 9.4.2, 9.3.7, 9.2.11, 9.1.16 and/or 9.0.20 PostgreSQL updates
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Problem
Confluence seems to start correctly with no errors and nothing is showing on the logs when trying to access the page
Diagnosis
Environment
- You're using PostgreSQL
- Applied the 9.4.2, 9.3.7, 9.2.11, 9.1.16 and/or 9.0.20 PostgreSQL updates
Diagnostic Steps
- The following appears in the PostgreSQL log pg_log
Starting PostgreSQL 9.1 database server * The PostgreSQL server failed to start. Please check the log output: 2015-05-26 03:27:20 UTC [331-1] LOG: database system was interrupted; last known up at 2015-05-21 19:56:58 UTC 2015-05-26 03:27:20 UTC [331-2] FATAL: could not open file "/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem": Permission denied 2015-05-26 03:27:20 UTC [330-1] LOG: startup process (PID 331) exited with exit code 1 2015-05-26 03:27:20 UTC [330-2] LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure
Cause
On May 22, 2015, the PostgreSQL project released a set of updates to all supported versions of PostgreSQL. One of the fixes included in this batch of updates forced fsyncing of all PostgreSQL files on a restart after a crash. This fix was added to prevent certain kinds of data corruption which can occur if a system hosting a database has several failures in a row.
Unfortunately, this fix causes issues with some users' PostgreSQL setups due to file permissions issues, which can cause PostgreSQL to refuse to restart after an unexpected shutdown, or when restoring from a binary backup (PITR).
This issue is slated to be fixed in the 2015-06-04 Update Release.
Workaround
As a temporary workaround, change the permissions on any symlinked files to being writable by the Postgres user. For example, on Ubuntu, with PostgreSQL 9.1, the following should work:
Make sure these configuration files are symbolic links before executing these commands! If someone has customized the server.crt or server.key file, you can erase them by following these steps. It's a good idea to make a backup of the server.crt and server.key files before removing them.
(as root)
# go to PGDATA directory
cd /var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main
ls -l server.crt server.key
# confirm both of those files are symbolic links
# to files in /etc/ssl before going further
# remove symlinks to SSL certs
rm server.crt
rm server.key
# copy the SSL certs to the local directory
cp /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem server.crt
cp /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key server.key
# set permissions on ssl certs
# and postgres ownership on everything else
# just in case
chown postgres *
chmod 640 server.crt server.key
service postgresql startYou will need to adapt the above example to your specific circumstances, but that should give you a general idea of what to do. The requirement is that the postgres user must have write access to everything in PGDATA or symlinked from PGDATA.
Resolution
The PostgreSQL project expects to release another update very soon which addresses the file permissions issue. The expected release date for this update is June 4.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/May_2015_Fsync_Permissions_Bug