KB486856: After updating MicroStrategy the Collaboration Service is not able to start, the diagnostics tools throws “failed to decrypt the password (<value>) with encryptionKeyFile (mstr_collab_aes.key)”

PREREQUISITES:

Before starting with this article, it is assumed that:

1. Collaboration is not able to start with TLS disabled.
2. Steps given in the Collaboration diagnostics area from LINK (https://www2.Strategy.com/producthelp/Current/InstallConfig/en-us/Content/library_admin_troubleshooting.htm) actually gives an error similar to: failed to decrypt the password (<value>)  with encryptionKeyFile (mstr_collab_aes.key)
3. It is desired to maintain the same configuration that comes with the installation
4. The config.json is validated to have all the necessary content:

"port": 3000,
    "authorizationServerUrl": "https://FQDN:8443/MicroStrategyLibrary/api",
    "dataSource": {
        "username": "mstr_collab",
        "password": "<encriptedPass>”,
        "port": 5432
    },
    "port" : 3000,
    "enableTls": true,
    "keystoreFile": "<keystoreFile>",
    "passphrase": "<MyPassphrase>",
    "trustedCerts": ["<trustedCerts Location>" ],
    "scaling": "none",
    "secretKey": "<MySecretKey>",
    "enableConfigApi": true,
     "logging”: true

PROBLEM:

The user had a properly configured environment after updating from a previous version and when trying to use Collaboration they noticed is not starting, the admin page shows stopped, the service manager shows is in a stopped state and the Collaboration diagnostics command shows the above-mentioned error

Unable to read JSON configuration file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MicroStrategy\Collaboration Server\config.json.
File does not contain valid field: failed to decrypt the password (==================)  with encryptionKeyFile (mstr_collab_aes.key)
 

CAUSE:

There could be a possibility that after upgrading the application the config.json was replaced with an older file to try and match the pre-update configuration but the content on the password does not match the correct values to successfully decrypt the password used for mstr_collab.
If the user is unable to recover these files or values, he will find himself soft-locked, and until this gets resolved; the services won’t be able to start up.

ACTION:

Assuming that the password is not recovered the best course of action would be generating a new one.
To archive this the first step would be collecting the default password used from mstr_collab.
NOTE: Before proceeding with any action do make backups of all pertinent files
 

1. Head to the Default_Accounts.txt file in the path:

Windows:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\MicroStrategy\Default_Accounts.txt and copy that password.
Linux:
<MSTR_INSTALL>/Repository/Default_Accounts.
 

1. After having this information in the clipboard, you could generate a new encoded password running the following command and pointing to the node.exe, encrypt.js and mstr_collab_aes.key files:

Windows:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\MicroStrategy\nodejs\node.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\MicroStrategy\Collaboration Server\node_modules\mstr-collab-svc\encrypt.js" "C:\Program Files (x86)\MicroStrategy\Collaboration Server\mstr_collab_aes.key" THE_MSTR_COLLAB_PASS_TO_ENCODE
Linux:
/opt/mstr/MicroStrategy/install/NodeJS/bin/node /opt/mstr/MicroStrategy/install/CollaborationServer/node_modules/mstr-collab-svc/encrypt.js /opt/mstr/MicroStrategy/install/CollaborationServer/mstr_collab_aes.key
THE_MSTR_COLLAB_PASS_TO_ENCODE
When doing this action there is going to be an output, this output is the password that you must collect and add in the password section of the config.json, the one pointing to the mstr_collab user
port": 3000,
    "authorizationServerUrl": "https://FQDN:8443/MicroStrategyLibrary/api",
    "dataSource": {
        "username": "mstr_collab",
        "password": "< THE_NEW_ ENCODED_MSTR_COLLAB_PASS >”,
        "port": 5432
    },
    "port" : 3000,
    "enableTls": true,
    "keystoreFile": "<keystoreFile>",
    "passphrase": "<MyPassphrase>",
    "trustedCerts": ["<trustedCerts Location>" ],
    "scaling": "none",
    "secretKey": "<MySecretKey>",
    "enableConfigApi": true,
     "logging”: true
 

1. After doing so, the Collaboration Diagnostic command shall be run once again to validate that the error has disappeared.

If the error persists, verify missing or extra characters when trying to collect the mstr_collab password before encoding or after collecting the newly encoded key. If the error changed it would be good to assume this issue has changed its context to another problem. In case of further difficulties please contact Strategy support with the details of what was tried
If no issues were observed, please try to start the service and evaluate the collaboration's correct functionality.