#1 being appended to usernames in Confluence

[Randy Erbacci]

We're using LDAP for authentication in Confluence 5.9.5. Recently when contacted by a user for not having his usual permission, I see that there are two accounts associated to his name in the user directory. One of his account appears to be his normal username and the other one is his normal username but is appended  by a "#1". Any idea of how this happened and how to prevent it? BTW, I'm not an expert on LDAP. Thanks.

[mfabris]

Hi Randy

I had this too in the past, without using LDAP. I am 99.9% sure the username with the "#1" appeared after two colleagues created the same identical username with the same identical email address. 

Getting rid of it is also a pain, as you have to do it directly on the db. Especially if both "clone" users have been used to comment/create pages. 

I suppose your user had the account created twice; or may be the user was already there before connecting to the LDAP directory, and after the connection it got duplicated.  I suggest you to go to the audit log (admin/uaditlogging) and search by username, may be you get more info

I hope it helps

best

[Randy Erbacci]

Hi Mirco, thanks for the info. I'll check the audit log to see if it provides more information.

[Shannon S]

Hi Randy,

This can happen if your Unique User ID Attribute isn't set correctly. You can find this under General > Users & Security > User Directories. Open your LDAP setup and under User Schema Settings, you will find it.

Review Connecting to an LDAP Directory:

User Unique ID Attribute - The attribute used as a unique immutable identifier for user objects. This is used to track username changes and is optional. If this attribute is not set (or is set to an invalid value), user renames will not be detected — they will be interpreted as a user deletion then a new user addition.

This should normally point to a UUID value. Standards-compliant LDAP servers will implement this as 'entryUUID' according to RFC 4530. This setting exists because it is known under different names on some servers, e.g. 'objectGUID' in Microsoft Active Directory.

Let us know if you have any questions or trouble!

Kind Regards,
Shannon

[Randy Erbacci]

Hi Shannon, thanks for your reply. We are using the Microsoft Active Directory and I checked our Unique ID Attribute and it's set to 'objectGUID' so I think we're good there. I'll keep digging around it's only happened once (so far).

Thanks again.

-Randy

[Shannon S]

Thank you for letting me know, Randy!

Hoping you'll be able to find something to help you out with Mirco's information. :)  If you find anything and need further help just let us know!

Kind Regards,
Shannon