Unable to remove local groups from Confluence which contain deleted LDAP users

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Problem

If Confluence is integrated with LDAP and users from LDAP have been associated with Confluence internal groups, users cannot be removed from groups if the orignal LDAP user has been deleted.

The following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: User unknown: [null] in [hibernateRepository]
	at com.atlassian.user.impl.hibernate.HibernateGroupManager.validateGroupAndUser(HibernateGroupManager.java:364)
	at com.atlassian.user.impl.hibernate.HibernateGroupManager.removeMembership(HibernateGroupManager.java:386)
	at com.atlassian.user.impl.cache.CachingGroupManager.removeMembership(CachingGroupManager.java:178)
	at com.atlassian.user.impl.delegation.DelegatingGroupManager.removeMembership(DelegatingGroupManager.java:234)
	at bucket.user.DefaultUserAccessor.removeMembership(DefaultUserAccessor.java:529)
	at com.atlassian.confluence.user.DefaultUserAccessor.removeMembership(DefaultUserAccessor.java:98)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)

Cause

In order for Confluence to remove a group, it tries to access the user record of the user. This causes an error, as the user no longer exists. The most common reason for the above case is if a previous employee is no longer with the company, and their LDAP record gets removed from LDAP without first removing them from all Confluence groups.

Workaround

Add a user with the same username as the deleted ldap user. You can do this by going to Confluence Admin> Manage Users. You can then disable login by ensuring that this new user belongs to no groups and does not have an entry in the Global Permissions.

Resolution

This problem was resolved in Confluence 3.5 as per CONF-14104.

Last modified on Mar 30, 2016

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.