Symptoms

Users with Umlaut characters in their usernames cannot log in or be deleted in JIRA. There are no errors in the log files. 

In the UI, we can see the following "User Does Not Exist" error:

Cause

The Apache Tomcat connector was not configured with UTF-8 encoding. 

Resolution

• Check the server.xml file found in $JIRA_INSTALLATION/conf/

• A standard connector may have the following configuration:

  <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
                 connectionTimeout="20000" 
                 redirectPort="8443"
                 URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

  In this case, the URIEncoding has been correctly set to UTF-8.

• In this example, the AJP Connector does not have any URIEncoding parameter set:

  <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />

  Simply add the URIEncoding parameter like so:

  <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

• Once done, restart JIRA and the problem should be fixed.