After updating the Jenkins installation from version 2.70 to 2.72 the server failed to start. The problem was that the init process detected an old installed open-jdk 1.7 as executing VM instead of using our custom installation in /opt/jdk/production.

Cause for this problem is a change in file /etc/init.d/jenkins which trys to detect the execting VM with the line:

JAVA=`type -p java`

Problem is that we set the Java installation via the /etc/defaults/jenkins file which points to the correct location. The new line overwrites the settings from the defaults file. After commenting the line, everything works as expected.