SolarWinds Web Helpdesk 12.7.2 post-upgrade problems

Recently after upgrading our WHD from 12.7.1 to 12.7.2 we started experiencing two issues that turned out to be related.

Adding comments to tickets could generate an error stating: “Something went wrong. Please contact SolarWinds support for assitance or review the Web Hep Desk logs.”

and when trying to upload attachments to tickets: “Your upload failed: Connection reset by peer: Amount read didn’t match content-length”

After some back and forth with SolarWinds support they said the issue is related to the version of Tomcat they bundled with WHD 12.7.2. The bundled version is 9.0.31 and SolarWinds recommends manually upgrading it to 9.0.34 to fix the issue.

The procedure I followed was:

# Login to your WHD server and become root

# Make a temp directory, go into it and download Tomcat 9.0.34
mkdir temp
cd temp
wget -c https://muug.ca/mirror/apache-dist/tomcat/tomcat-9/v9.0.34/bin/apache-tomcat-9.0.34.tar.gz

# Stop WHD
service stop webhelpdesk

# Backup your existing WHD Tomcat directory just in case
cd /usr/local/webhelpdesk/bin
tar -cf tomcatBackup-20200423.tar tomcat
gzip -9 tomcatBackup-20200423.tar

# Copy Tomcat 9.0.34 overtop of Tomcat 9.0.31 while preserving WHD related content
cd ~/temp
cd apache-tomcat-9.0.34
cp -Raf bin conf lib NOTICE RELEASE-NOTES /usr/local/webhelpdesk/bin/tomcat/

# Reboot your server or manually start WHD back up
shutdown -r now
# OR
service webhelpdesk start

Once we did this the errors above went away.

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