We're happy to announce that plans are in the works to upgrade to the latest release of JIRA. JIRA 7 introduces a number of new features to JIRA, which are detailed in Atlassian's Migration Hub.
As the first step in the process I'd like to invite users of SLAC JIRA to test out the new version. We have an upgraded install of JIRA on our testing site located at https://jira-test.slac.stanford.edu. Be aware that this testing system is restricted only users connected from within the SLAC network, so you won't be able to see it if you're not on-site or using a VPN connection.
Feel free to take a look around, try out your projects, and make sure everything looks good. Keep in mind that this system isn't regularly synced from the production service, so some newer changes may not reflected in the testing system.
Send your feedback to atlassian-admin@slac.stanford.edu. We will make follow-up announcement in the coming weeks with details about our planned upgrade date. If you know of any upcoming events that may be impacted by a JIRA upgrade please let us know and we can work around those dates as much as possible.
Lately we've been investigating some performance issues with the Confluence server. During this investigation it was discovered that the server has been experiencing unusually high load for a number of days. Here's a graph of system load for the month of March:
After some investigation it was determined that Confluence is experiencing symptoms of a known issue with a recently added File Conversion feature to the Confluence application. This File Conversion service is responsible for preparing attachments for display in the new new Confluence Previews feature. You may have seen the Previews window, which is displays files attached to Confluence pages in an in-browser Lightbox.
The discovery of this bug also coincides with concerns raised by several users about the Previews feature. A recent poll shows that an overwhelming number of users dislike this feature and would prefer a return to the pre-upgrade attachment behavior. With all of these factors in mind we have decided to disable the Confluence Previews and File Conversion plugins in Confluence. The impact to users will be that when a link to an attachment is clicked in a Confluence page it will perform the default behavior for that file type for your browser, rather than opening in the Previews Lightbox.
For more information on the bug that is impacting Confluence see the following Atlassian bug report: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-38233
Further details is available in Atlassian's Confluence Documentation: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/file-conversion-service-causes-out-of-memory-errors-in-confluence-5-7-or-above-703398523.html
The change is planned for Monday at 5:30pm. A short outage will be required as part of that change to clear out the stuck File Conversion processes and reduce system load.l
If you have any questions or concerns please contact apps-admin@slac.stanford.edu
You may have noticed that Confluence now opens attachments in its own built-in preview tool. Some users have expressed a desire to disable this feature, but unfortunately Confluence does not yet offer any way for a user to selectively disable this feature.
If you'd like to open an attachment and avoid this previews feature there is a workaround. When you click the link to open the attachment hold down the ctrl key (or cmd if you're using a mac). Using this shortcut will open the attachment in another browser tab. This should then execute your browser's default action for that type of file, or prompt you to decide whether to save or open that file in a program.
A new development instance of Confluence is available for testing. We would like for Confluence users to take a look at their pages there and let us know if there are any issues.
The Confluence Development site is only available from SLAC's network (on-site or via VPN). It can be accessed from the following URL:
https://confluence-dev01.slac.stanford.edu
Please send feedback to atlassian-admin@slac.stanford.edu
As part of routine maintenance, the Confluence, JIRA and Crowd processes will be restarted on Wednesday, July 29th, between 5:30 and 6:00pm PDT.
We probably can not/will not change this globally, but you can change it yourself. First go to:
https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/users/viewmyemailsettings.action
and turn off "Autowatch". Now you will no longer automatically be subscribed to pages you edit. Next go to:
https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/users/viewnotifications.action
and unsubscribe from all the pages you not longer (or never did) care about (by clicking on the little envelope on the right hand side). If (like me) you have 12 pages of page watches this can be a little time consuming, but there does not appear to be any "unwatch all" feature.
Note also that the Page Watches is buggy (or at least has poor usability features), when you click to go to page 2, it first removes all the items you have unwatched, so you then have to go back to page 1 and unwatch all the items which have now migrated there.
Confluence and JIRA are scheduled for a brief maintenance outage on Monday, March 9th between 5:30PM and 6:30PM PDT.
In order to apply security patches on the database and application servers, Confluence, JIRA and Crowd will be unavailable starting at 5:30pm PST today (1/29).
We expect to have service restored by 6:30pm.
There will be a short outage of Confluence on Tuesday, Jan 20th, starting at 5:30pm PST, for maintenance. Maintenance is required to apply security updates to the application.
Maintenance complete as of 5:35PM PST
There will be a short outage of Confluence, JIRA and Crowd on Tuesday, Jan 20th, starting at 5:30pm PST, for maintenance. This will include updating the SSL certificate for Crowd.
Confluence can no longer synchronize its user authorization data from crowd, so updates in crowd are no longer propagating to confluence. To correct this we need to disable the confluence/jira single-sign-on feature, which requires an outage. We plan to do that tonight at 5:30pm. Since this has been a recurring problem, we plan to leave Confluence/JIRA single-sign-on disabled. This may allow us to fix problems in the future without taking an outage. We expect to have confluence back in service by 6:00 pm.
On Tuesday, November 18th, Confluence, JIRA and Crowd will be restarted as part of our monthly maintenance. The applications will be unavailable intermittently between 5:30 and 6:00 pm PST. We recommend users save their work and log off before 5:30.
Confluence, JIRA and Crowd will be unavailable intermittently between 5:30 and 6:00pm PDT on Tuesday, Oct 21, while we perform routine monthly maintenance.
We will have brief outages of Confluence and JIRA to update their SSL certificates on Monday, September 22, between 5:30 to 6:00pm PDT.
Please send any questions to apps-admin@slac.stanford.edu
In order to re-establish single-sign-on between Confluence, JIRA and Crowd, we will have an outage starting at 6pm on Tuesday, September 9th. The outage may take up to 1.5 hours. Confluence and JIRA will be unavailable (intermittently) during this period. Users should save their work before the outage. Send any questions to apps-admin@slac.stanford.edu .