NullPointerException when Authenticating from IE
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Symptoms
After logging into JIRA using any version of Internet Explorer you are greeted with the following stack trace appearing on the dashboard:
Problem Description:
Cause:
java.lang.NullPointerException
Stack Trace: [hide]
java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.net.URI$Parser.parse(URI.java:3003)
at java.net.URI.<init>(URI.java:578)
at com.atlassian.gadgets.dashboard.internal.diagnostics.DiagnosticsServlet.executeDiagnostics(DiagnosticsServlet.java:83)
at com.atlassian.gadgets.dashboard.internal.diagnostics.DiagnosticsServlet.doPost(DiagnosticsServlet.java:61)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:637)
...
Cause
A request made by the browser while rendering the dashboard is corrupted before it hits JIRA.
One cause of this corruption is a combination of Apache HTTPd + mod-auth-sspi proxying infront of JIRA for a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. Configuring Apache HTTPd in this way allows Internet Explorer to authenticate using NTLM. However, once IE authenticates using NTLM it requires re-authentication for each POST request from then on (see Microsoft's Knowledge Base). This hits a bug in the mod-auth-sspi module such that it allows through invalid requests to JIRA.
Resolution
Disable mod-auth-sspi because it is broken.