G'day again Nick,

Jira is working fine now, just needed to sort out a couple of plugin issues but it seems to be chugging along nicely now. Was in light use last week with little in the way of complaints (one was I forgot the SVN plugin), it'll see normal use this week.

I don't know if it helps from your side, but the two Atlassian pages that helped the most were:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Starting+JIRA+Standalone+automatically+on+Linux
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Setting+up+JIRA+Standalone+and+MySQL+on+Linux

Points that I wasn't quite prepared for that were of note

• starting jira with sudo is a good way to cause weird problems later (as root starts to own bits of the app directory)
• uninstalling a plugin (fisheye) means repacking a .jar file without it
• SQL database should be made with InnoDB and utf-8 defaults (this is mentioned in the comments of the above page but not in the main text)
• the jira log tells you when it's ready for viewing (watching it with "less +F" was very helpful), which really helps when you're wondering when the xml import is finished (~20min for us)
• the xml import process doesn't bring across the SVN password for the SVN plugin - that had to be re-entered, though the rest of the settings were imported