JDK update problem warning

[kevin....@stfc.ac.uk]

Dear potential JDK updaters,

 

I have just hit this problem after updating to the latest JDK so I thought I would warn others who may hit the same problem.

 

Having just yum updated a range of RHEL 5, 6 and 7 machines with JDK 7 and 8 installed on them and running Glassfish, I discovered that the RHEL 5 VMs running OpenJDK 7 were no longer able to serve HTTPs connections through Glassfish.

 

After upgrading the OpenJDK package to the latest version as part of a yum update, when you load a HTTPs page in a browser you get an error saying that the connection was closed and not much more detail than that. In the Glassfish server log you get the following exceptions each time you request a HTTPs page:

 

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: System property jdk.tls.namedGroups(null) contains no supported elliptic curves

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class sun.security.ssl.SupportedEllipticCurvesExtension

 

After some googling for these errors I found the following page:

 

https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-html/SERVER-1720/SERVER-1720.html

 

where they explain that this is a bug affecting JDK 7 and 8 which will be fixed in the next release. They also mention it affecting other versions of RHEL although I don’t understand why it is not affecting other servers for me yet. The solution for now is to downgrade back to the previous version using for example:

 

yum downgrade java-1.7.0-openjdk.x86_64 java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel

 

So make sure you test a HTTPs page after your yum update and Glassfish restart, and downgrade the JDK if you have the same problem.

 

Cheers,

 

Kevin