Symptoms

1. Trying to access the Plugins page within the JIRA administration menu results in:

   Cause: 
   com.atlassian.templaterenderer.RenderingException: org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'isLegacyLicensingCompatibilitySpiUpm20Aware' in class com.atlassian.upm.UpmVersionTracker threw exception java.lang.NullPointerException at plugin-manager.vm[line 805, column 60]
   
   
   Stack Trace: [hide]
   com.atlassian.templaterenderer.RenderingException: org.apache.velocity.exception.MethodInvocationException: Invocation of method 'isLegacyLicensingCompatibilitySpiUpm20Aware' in class com.atlassian.upm.UpmVersionTracker threw exception java.lang.NullPointerException at plugin-manager.vm[line 805, column 60]
   at com.atlassian.templaterenderer.velocity.one.six.internal.VelocityTemplateRendererImpl.render(VelocityTemplateRendererImpl.java:100)
   at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)

2. Database errors appear in the atlassian-jira.log (the errors will look different depending on the database that JIRA uses):

   2012-03-23 11:56:18,883 http-8000-6 ERROR administrator 716x36x1 4nu2wr 127.0.0.1 /rest/plugins/1.0/notifications/administrator [server.impl.application.WebApplicationImpl] Internal server error
   java.lang.NullPointerException
   	at org.ofbiz.core.entity.jdbc.SQLProcessor.prepareStatement(SQLProcessor.java:525)
   	at org.ofbiz.core.entity.GenericDAO.selectListIteratorByCondition(GenericDAO.java:1034)

   Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver
   	at org.apache.felix.framework.ModuleImpl.findClassOrResourceByDelegation(ModuleImpl.java:772)
   	at org.apache.felix.framework.ModuleImpl.access$200(ModuleImpl.java:73)

Diagnosis

JIRA is using this version of the plugin manager:

• Atlassian Universal Plugin Manager Plugin 2.0.5

Cause

The UPM plugin needs to access the database to store plugin data and check versions/licenses.  In this case, it is unable to properly access the database (possibly due to parsing errors) when the password contains special characters/symbols.

Workaround

Change the database password, removing special characters.  Update/restart JIRA to use this new password