Unknown User (u.sername) issue

[Michel Hoogervorst]

One of our users complained about not being able to login anymore. He had some issues logging in since about a week he told me. Of course, when I stood next to him the logon process worked fine, but he had lost all his tasks and profile picture.

Now, when I search for his username using the search-field at the top of the screen, I see a user called "Unknown User (u.sername)" (offcourse not really u.sername but his true username ). When I seek his full name I see his full name as a user. When I click either one of them, I get the same profile page of user "u.sername". Confluence tells me that this account was created Mar 30, 2015 12:27, about a week ago.

We didn't made any configuration changes on that date... we did update confluence to the latest version but have done so a week before that date. Nothing was wrong with his account after the upgrade.

In the database I see that this user has two user_key's:

mysql> select * from user_mapping where username='u.sername';
+----------------------------------+-------------+----------------+
| user_key                         | username    | lower_username |
+----------------------------------+-------------+----------------+
| xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | u.sername   | u.sername      |
| yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy | u.sername   | NULL           |
+----------------------------------+-------------+----------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

We use atlassian crowd to login to confluence through a local JIRA instance, which on its turn uses Active Directory for authentication. Nothing was changed on both JIRA and our AD at this date as well.

I see that Confluence did a userdir-sync exactly at the time the user was 'created', in the log it says:

2015-03-30 12:27:58,322 INFO [scheduler_Worker-2] [atlassian.crowd.directory.DbCachingRemoteChangeOperations] addUsers adding [ 1 ] users

In the JIRA log however, no changes for the userdir are mentioned.

Could someone point us in a direction on how this could have happened and is it possible to merge both 'user_keys' so this user gets his tasks back?

[Michel Hoogervorst · Accepted solution]

Our problem is solved with the help of Atlassian support. First they pointed me to this bug: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-36018

At the end I had to do a lot of extra queries (specific to our setup) to solve this, so I don't think it's a good idea to post those here.

[Michel Hoogervorst]

OK, in the meantime I learned that someone responsible for our AD did rename the account, but after some issues he reverted this change. I think we can safely assume that this is probably the moment that this issue was originated. I'd still like to know if it is possible to merge both users back into the old one so he gets his stuff (like his tasks and profile picture) back.