Unable to log in to confluence - "Could not find group configured with USE permission"

[Grímur Daníelsson]

I'm using LDAP/active directory for authentication and we were changing some configurations for LDAP which seemed to work fine. The main thingt hat was changed is that we added a Group DN to the config to search for groups. We got this working fine and we were able to log in and synchronise with LDAP just fine.

Now I got the genius idea to disable the internal confluence directory to try to reduce the amount of active users since we're 1 above our license limit.

After that I'm unable to log in using any user, not the local admin account or active directory users. I've reenabled the internal directory in the the database and changed the directory order without success. 

These are the messages I get from the logs:

2017-09-06 08:55:26,967 INFO [read-only-transaction:thread-1] [atlassian.confluence.user.DefaultUserAccessor] getUserNamesWithConfluenceAccess Could not find group configured with USE permission: confluence-users
2017-09-06 08:55:26,967 INFO [read-only-transaction:thread-1] [atlassian.confluence.user.DefaultUserAccessor] getUserNamesWithConfluenceAccess Could not find group configured with USE permission: confluence-administrators
2017-09-06 08:55:27,828 INFO [localhost-startStop-1] [com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle] init Confluence is ready to serve
2017-09-06 08:56:53,198 WARN [http-nio-3011-exec-8] [atlassian.seraph.auth.DefaultAuthenticator] login login : 'admin' tried to login but they do not have USE permission or weren't found. Deleting remember me cookie.
 -- referer: http://docs.company.local/dologin.action | url: /dologin.action | traceId: b558b8b887f9be42
2017-09-06 08:57:07,576 WARN [http-nio-3011-exec-2] [atlassian.seraph.auth.DefaultAuthenticator] login login : 'ADuser' tried to login but they do not have USE permission or weren't found. Deleting remember me cookie.
 -- referer: http://docs.company.local/dologin.action | url: /dologin.action | traceId: 8e20a373d41e0be0

I have made sure that both of these users are in the confluence-users and confluence-admin groups in the cwd_membership table in the database(of which there are two sets for some reason) but that didn't make any difference.

I've restarted confluence multiple times after each database change but it still doesn't work.

[Yilin · Accepted solution]

Please bear in mind that in the newer version of Confluence, we have the group membership aggregation enable by default, so in case that the admin user account or ADuser user account are duplicated on both Internal and LDAP user directory with different set of membership setting when the Internal one is disabled, those users might lose access due the membership change. 

I would like to suggest you to double check the membership setting via the database whether it belongs to the LDAP user directory, Otherwise, you might need to adjust the membership on the LDAP server for both user, restart Confluence to force the synchronization before you can log in again.

[Grímur Daníelsson]

I have an internal user and an AD user with the same usernames, that was probably what caused it. But I managed to solve the problem by using a database backup from a couple of days ago.

Regardless, thanks for the help.