After upgrade to 2.8.0-m1 from 2.7.2-rc4, logging to Crowd Console starts failing with the following on-screen error message

Connection to authentication server failed. Please review the logs for more information.

and these exceptions in log: https://bitbucket.org/pastes/atlassian/cXKy/raw/e153dd3fc8ac6a87f6d0a59572c916b8e5f0b48f/paste.txt.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install a 2.7.2-rc4 using a newly created PostgreSQL database.
2. Log in to Crowd console as admin and visit several random pages.
3. Shutdown Crowd and see that the Java process disappears.
4. Install a 2.8.0-m1 (extracting the tar.gz file) and point it to the same data directory as that of the 2.7.2-rc4 instance.
5. Start up 2.8.0-m1 and see that the upgrade process kicks in and finishes.
6. Go to the same browser session that has not been logged out from, expecting to be able to continue to access Crowd console.
7. The actual observation is that the page stagnates for about a minute; at the same time this error message appears in the log:

   2014-05-19 00:56:30,712 http-bio-8095-exec-1 ERROR [xfire.transport.http.HttpChannel] java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
   2014-05-19 00:56:30,738 http-bio-8095-exec-3 INFO [service.soap.client.SecurityServerClientImpl] Existing application token is null, authenticating ...
   

8. Then instead of the original page, the login screen shows up.
9. Log in as the same admin user.
10. The login screen hangs too for another minute, and then the following error message appears on the screen: Connection to authentication server failed. Please review the logs for more information.
11. At the same time when the aforementioned error message appears on the screen, these exceptions appear in the log: https://bitbucket.org/pastes/atlassian/cXKy/raw/e153dd3fc8ac6a87f6d0a59572c916b8e5f0b48f/paste.txt.

Trying again or restarting Crowd does not fix the problem.