How to remove previous admin from jira-administrators group?

[Marcos Martinez]

The previous administrator who originally set up JIRA left the team, and now as new sys-adm I cannot kick him out of the "jira-administrators" group.

Any idea on how to do this?

[Alejandro Conde Carrillo · Accepted solution]

From Editing group membership:

• If the group has the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission, you cannot edit its membership unless you have the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission.

Does your user has the 'JIRA System Administrators' permission? You will need it to remove the membership.

[Marcos Martinez]

Yes, he does have JIRA SysAdm perms. And that is because he belongs to group "jira-administrators". But I cannot eject him from this group, so I am in a dead-end here...

[Marcos Martinez]

I found a way to do this, just delete on database level the jira-admin group of the person, then restart JIRA

SELECT * FROM cwd_membership WHERE child_name = 'xxxxxxxxx';

DELETE FROM cwd_membership WHERE id = xxxxx;

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You never worked out why you couldn't do it though - was he the only admin? Were you in the group as well?

[Frode Haugland]

No i didnt. 5 more users in this group. I had a theory that only the initial admin could remove from this group, but did not seem like it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm curious simply because it sounds like something is broken. It won't let you remove the last (active) admin, but if there are others in the group, it should. Resorting to SQL is ignoring the real problem, but in this case, should be safe.

[Frode Haugland]

I have a similar problem. I am allowed to perform all operations and click all the correct buttons but it doesn't seem to have any effect. The user remains in the group.

[crf]

I cannot kick him out of the "jira-administrators" group.

What exactly do you mean by "cannot" here?  As in it doesn't let you go to the user administration pages at all?  It greys out the options to modify group memberships?  You can attempt to modify the groups, but it gives you an error message (what message)?  It doesn't react at all?  It looks like it does something, but when you go back to check the group is really still there?

You say that your user is in system-administrators, but I'm wondering if you explicitly added your new sys admin to jira-administrators as well?  You haven't said what version you are using, and I would not be surprised if one of the checks is confused by you having system administration privileges but not basic administration privileges.  You cannot remove the last user that has that privilege, so if you have not granted it to yourself, then it won't let you remove it from someone else.

In other words, even though being a system admin allows you to modify permissions, including your own, and even though it implies basic administration in most respects, this particular check may not honour that.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You can't remove the last user, you need to make sure you are in the group to replace him.