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This page gives guidelines on how to request help from the Atlassian support team if you are having problems with external user management. External user management includes connections to Active Directory, other LDAP servers, Atlassian Crowd or Atlassian JIRA for user management. The information on this page is provided in addition to the more general page on Troubleshooting Problems and Requesting Technical Support.

The cause of such problems may be:

The LDAP server is not responding.
The application password is incorrectly configured, causing the LDAP server or other directory to return an authentication error.
Other LDAP settings are incorrectly configured.

On this page:

Troubleshooting the Connection to your External User Directory

The configuration screen for external directories in Confluence has a 'Test Settings' button. This will help you to diagnose problems with user management in Active Directory and other LDAP servers.

To test your directory connection:

Click 'User Directories' in the left-hand panel.
Edit the relevant directory.
Click 'Test Settings'.
The results of the test will appear at the top of the screen.

Please refer to our knowedge base articles for troubleshooting user management and login issues.

If the above resources do not help, continue below.

Problems During Initial Setup

Raise a support request and include the following information.

Download an LDAP browser to make sure you have the right settings in your LDAP directory. Atlassian recommends LDAP Studio. Include screenshots of your user and group DNs.
If you can start up Confluence and access the Administration Console, review your directory settings. See Connecting to an LDAP Directory. Attach screenshots of all your settings.

Complex Authentication or Performance Problems

Raise a support request and include the following information.

Confluence Server

Log in to Confluence and access the Administration Console.

Take a screenshot of the 'System Information' screen, or save the page as HTML.
Take a screenshot of the 'Global Permissions' screen, if people are having problems with logging in.
Go to 'Space Admin' for the relevant space and take a screenshot of the 'Permissions' page, if you are having problems with space or page permissions.

Confluence Configuration Files

If you have implemented a custom authenticator or in any way modified seraph-config.xml or seraph-paths.xml, please provide the modified file.

User Management System

Include the name and version of your LDAP server.
Does your LDAP server use dynamic or static groups?
Review your directory settings. See Connecting to an LDAP Directory. Attach screenshots of all your settings.

Diagnostics

Enable profiling. See Performance Tuning.

Enable detailed user management logging, by editing confluence/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties.
Change this section:

###
# Atlassian User
###
#log4j.logger.com.atlassian.user=DEBUG
#log4j.logger.com.atlassian.confluence.user=DEBUG
#log4j.logger.bucket.user=DEBUG
#log4j.logger.com.atlassian.seraph=DEBUG
#log4j.logger.com.opensymphony.user=DEBUG

Remove the '#' signs at the beginning of the lines, so that it looks like this:

###
# Atlassian User
###
log4j.logger.com.atlassian.user=DEBUG
log4j.logger.com.atlassian.confluence.user=DEBUG
log4j.logger.bucket.user=DEBUG
log4j.logger.com.atlassian.seraph=DEBUG
log4j.logger.com.opensymphony.user=DEBUG

After enabling both the above, please attempt a Confluence LDAP account login and attach a copy of the log files that are produced when the problem occurs. To do this, locate your install directory or exploded WAR directory, then zip the full /logs subdirectory into a single file for us to examine.The logs subdirectory is located in your Confluence Home directory.