Symptoms

When attempting to access a page that requires Administration Access, or websudo (as in Configuring Secure Administrator Sessions), the page incorrectly redirects to http://secure/admin/WebSudoAuthenticate.jspa, as below: 

Nothing will appear in the atlassian-jira.log as this error is from Tomcat and will not throw an exception.

Cause

The Tomcat server.xml has been configured incorrectly and this is causing the problem to occur, as below:

<Context docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" path="/" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">

This should be path="" rather than path="/".

Resolution

1. Backup the Tomcat server.xml file, as found in $JIRA_INSTALL/conf.

2. Modify the Context path so that it no longer has the forward slash, for example:

   <Context docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" path="" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">

3. Restart JIRA.
4. Test to ensure Administration Sections can now be accessed.