Overview

When upgrading an On-Premise instance to 9.8 (from 9.6 or earlier), users may see 404 errors in the browser and the below error in SBS logs:

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.util.Hashtable.put(Hashtable.java:460)
at org.apache.log4j.MDC.put0(MDC.java:150)
at org.apache.log4j.MDC.put(MDC.java:85)

A node may fail to start.

This appears to be a regression of an issue that was encountered when upgrading to 9.0.7, and was likely reintroduced in 9.7.

Solution

To fix this issue, you need to follow the below steps:

1. Start the test instance from 9.6 (or older) again.
2. Before the upgrade, edit or add the following system properties to have a value of false:
   jive.audit.authentication.logging.enabled
   jive.audit.email.logging.enabled
   jive.audit.email.body.logging.enabled
   jive.audit.logging.enabled

Perform the upgrade to the latest version again (remove any fixpacks that were applied to 9.6 and remove any incompatible plugins before performing the upgrade)