Personal Space Results in 500 Error due to Siteminder Configuration
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
This problem is related to a third party plugin, and therefore not supported by Atlassian. See Atlassian Supported Plugins for more information.
Symptoms
The Siteminder SSO authenticator is enabled in Confluence.
An Internal Server Error (500) is returned when browsing to personal spaces. No other error message is printed (even in logs). Additionally, image links that have a "//" in their URL (such as the ones generated by the Profile Picture Macro) do not render as expected.
1
500 Error
Cause
Siteminder maintains a list of bad characters, which are character sequences that cannot be used in URL sequences. If the Siteminder web agent finds a bad character in the URL, it will reject the request. By default, the tilde (~) and two forward slashes (//) are included in the list.
Resolution
In the Siteminder configuration file, remove the '~' and '//' from the bad characters list.
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