jk sending the activate of null to server (patch available)

[Hendrik Brummermann]

Updating from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 breaks libapache2-mod-jk in combination with winstone (e. g. Hudson and Jenkins).

Apache will return a 502 Bad Gateway error because Jenkin throws a NullPointerException caused by an invalid "activation" attribute sent by mod_jk.

Upstream bugreport and patch: https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=52793

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 apt-cache policy libapache2-mod-jk
libapache2-mod-jk:
  Installed: 1:1.2.32-1
  Candidate: 1:1.2.32-1
  Version table:
 *** 1:1.2.32-1 0
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ngrep -d tun0
interface: tun0 (10.8.0.1/255.255.255.255)

####
T 10.12.23.1:39838 -> 10.12.23.6:8009 [AP]
  .4......HTTP/1.1.../jenkins...xx.xx.xxx.xxx.....xxxxxxxxxxxx.org..P.......xxxxxxxxxxxx.org....NMozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1....?te
  xt/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8...Accept-Language..#de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3...Accept-Encoding...gzip, deflate.....keep-alive.....no-cache.
  ..Cache-Control...no-cache.....0....AJP_REMOTE_PORT...50994....JK_LB_ACTIVATION....

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Peter Ansell (p-ansell)]

I came across the upstream bug referenced in this bug report after getting mod_jk working with tomcat7, while not having it work with jenkins/winstone due to the NullPointerException.

Is there a time that version 1.2.37 has to sit on the 12.10 and 13.04 branches before fixes to support common applications like jenkins get accepted back into the 12.04 branch?

Versions 1.2.33 and 1.2.34 were known to be unstable, but the current 1.2.37 release was released on 31 May 2012 so if it was unstable then we would know about it by now.

[Michiel Hendriks (elmuerte)]

Looking at the upstream bug report it's a one line fix. So instead of making a massive change like introducing 1.2.37, I think it's better to include the one-line patch in the 1.2.32 build.

Besides winstone, jetty is also affected by this bug.

[Michiel Hendriks (elmuerte)]

I've created a patched 1.2.32 version for 12.04 which only contains the above mentioned patch. So far its working properly.
The patched version is available from my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~elmuerte/+archive/12.04