Confluence Active Directory integration

Question

New Confluence User, installed on to RedHat Server (on-prem) and integrating with Active Directory.

All seems to work well but for some reason we have a number of users constantly being removed and then added back in during the sync process.

Example for the Audit Log tonight (username changed!):

20 Sep, 2017 23:35:26SystemUsers and groupsUser created

User: user1Show more20 Sep, 2017 22:35:30SystemUsers and groupsUser deleted

User: user1Show more

Has anyone seen this issue before?  Any suggestions?

Thanks, Chris.

Chloe Isherwood · Answer

@AnnWorley, we are also having this issue.

We disabled incremental synchronisation as you suggested and this is now working as expected. How can we revert to incremental synchronisation again without this reoccurring?

Thanks.

AnnWorley · Answer

We have seen this issue before. It can have a number of different causes. On this question, for example, the two people posting both had the same symptom, with different root causes: Users getting deleted and readded after every incremental synchronisation

One was caused by a missing LDAP attribute that Confluence was looking for. The other was solved by making sure that "only when finding the user's group membership" was checked for the Use the User Membership Attribute in the LDAP User Directory advanced settings.

Please try the following to narrow down the issue:

* Check whether full sync behaves differently from incremental: Disable incremental synchronization by unchecking the box in the User Directory settings, and then perform a full sync. The synchronization will be logged in the <confluence_home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log. You can see from that log when users are deleted/re-added.
* Un-tick the Follow Referrals checkbox in the LDAP settings. "Follow Referrals" can direct Confluence to a different LDAP server; when it syncs with that other server it is possible that it isn't finding the users it just added, so it then deletes them.
* Consider using the AD Global Catalog to sync Confluence with, as described in: How do I search from Active Directory's global catalog?

I look forward to hearing what you find. If you fix the issue, please follow up on the thread for the sake of those who experience this issue in the future.