How to enable configuration of Crowd connection for other users?

[Daniel Mohr]

I have a Confluence installation which is connected to Crowd for user management. The order of the configured directories is the following:

- internal directory
- Crowd

When logging in to Confluence, I am able to configure the connection to Crowd. My user is somehow contained in the internal directory, I guess because with this user, the whole thing was set up. Now I would like another admin user to be able to also configure the connection to Crowd in Confluence. But all others users are logged in through Crowd and because of this cannot configure the connection.

How can I add a user, which is contained in the Crowd directory to the internal directory of Confluence in order to enable him to configure the Crowd directory connection?

[AndrewA · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel,
It sounds as though we may be shadowing our Crowd user with the internal direcotry. To give some background, if a user exists in the first direcotry (in this case the internal direcotry) then when the user logs in they are authenticated for this first entry. This is regardless of whether or not the same username exists in any subsequent diectories and there is no way around it. Additionaly, as you know, a user cannot edit the user direcotry settings for the direcotry they are authenticated against (this is a safety measure so we do not lock our selves out).

So in short, there is no way to have a user with the same name that can authenticate via the Crowd direcotry as well as edit it. My adivce would be to use the account which was used for the initial installation as a service account for administrators to make system level changes.

Cheers,
Andrew

[Daniel Mohr]

Thanks Andrew, this is a feasible workaround. Is it in general possible to manually add a user to the internal directory of confluence? If we change the order of directories to have Crowd to be always the first and just turn it around to edit it, the other admin user who would then also be in internal directory would be able to login through it and edit the other one. Am I wrong?

[AndrewA]

Hi Daniel,

We can add a user to the internal direcotry by ensureing the internal direcotry is in the top postion and then adding them view Confluences add-user functions.

What you have stated is correct in that we could flip the directories whenever we need to edit the Crowd settings (which in theory should be rare). So yes we could do this but some would see it as inconvience but that is jsut an opinion.

Cheers,
Andrew