Summary

If one of the following characters is part of the Postgres/RDS password in the setup wizard/CloudFormation template, Crowd breaks and initial login to Data Center will fail.

Environment

Hipchat Data Center 3.1.1

Steps to Reproduce

1. Deploy Hipchat Data Center
2. Setup the default Postgres/RDS password to include one of the characters above

Expected Results

Hipchat Data Center works as expected and initial login succeeds after registering the group owner.

Actual Results

• Initial login fails with The email and password you entered don't match.
• /var/log/hipchat/atlassian-crowd.log is empty
• /opt/atlassian/crowd/apache-tomcat/logs/catalina.out shows:

  com.atlassian.config.ConfigurationException: Failed to parse config file: Error on line 16 of document  : The reference to entity "the password section after the special character" must end with the ';' delimiter. Nested exception: The reference to entity "the password section after the special character" must end with the ';' delimiter.
  

Notes

• We should add a note to the documentation/CloudFormation template to state that the special characters above and "#" are not allowed in the RDS/Postgres password.
• Alternatively, we can fix Crowd so it doesn't break when special characters are used in the Postgres/RDS password.
• This issue is similar to HCPUB-3590 where the "#" character breaks Scissortail.

Workaround

AWS

Update the CloudFormation template by removing the special character from the RDS password and re-deploy.

VMware

1. Update the Postgres password
2. Update configuration.json with the new password

3. hipchat datacenter configure --file /path/to/configuration.json
   

4. hipchat datacenter restart