Symptoms

Users outside of Crowd Directory cannot log in when Confluence is integrated to Crowd version 2.1 - 2.2.1.

Cause

This is caused by a known bug, CONF-22080, which causes the crowd user authentication to fail to fall check any directory after Crowd in Confluence's User Directories table.

Workaround

This workaround is only required if you are using Crowd 2.1 - 2.2.1, and cannot upgrade Crowd.

1. Upgrade to 3.5 using an atlassian-user.xml configuration that does not mention Crowd.
2. Log in to Confluence as user who is a member of confluence-administrators, and browse to Confluence Admin > Security > User Directories, manually add the crowd directory and ensure it is the last directory in the user directory table.

Limitations

With this workaround in place, users in Crowd and any other user directory will be authenticated in that earlier directory, and not in Crowd. If those user accounts are configured with different passwords, this would mean that users will have to use different passwords to login to Confluence.

Resolution

Upgrade to Crowd 2.2.2 or higher.