After upgrading Splunk, why does splunkweb fail to load on random browsers with javascript errors?

[yannK]

After an upgrade of Splunk, I sometimes have random browsers (usually IE) unable to load the pages.

In the developer browser tools, I found errors about javascript missing.

example :

Uncaught ReferenceError: Splunk is not defined login:57
Uncaught ReferenceError: initUpdateChecker is not defined login:193

This seems to be a cache issue as it differs between clients.

[yannK · Accepted solution]

They are 2 ways to investigate

First : clear the cache on the splunkweb server
(in case there is a discrepancy between the client and server cache versions)

1. On the search-head while splunk is still running
2. clear the $SPLUNK_HOME/var/run/splunk/appserver/* folder
3. then retry from a web client to reload (you should see the appserver repopulated on the webserver)

Second technique : disable the javascript minification
(when the javascripts are compacted together in a big one to send to the client)

1. on the search-head edit web.conf
2. add

[settings]
minify_js=false

3. restart to apply
4. reload the webclient browser

[anthonysomerset]

just had a related issue (different JS error) after upgrading to 7.2.6 - clearing the cache didn't work but disable minify and restart did - we run splunk behind nginx which is doing SSL termination and HTTP/2 so the performance impact should be negligable to us