Image Courtesy of walknboston via Flickr CC

While working to migrate several web applications and update infrastructure, we also wanted to make some changes to the settings for our LDAP/Active Directory authentication for both Atlassian Confluence and Jira. Before Confluence 3.5, the custom authentication configurations we set in the atlassian-user.xml file. Starting with Confluence 3.5, these settings were automatically upgraded into a database stored and Confluence UI managed User Directory.

To my amazement, we went into Confluence –> Confluence Admin –> User Directories. Wow, there was not ability to edit the user directory configured for our Active Directory/LDAP authentication. After a bit of searching, the answer was simple, although i think this is a simple UX opportunity, i.e. notification box.

See, I was logged into my Active Directory account in Confluence. Doing so, I was authenticated against this user directory. Therefore, I was not allowed to edit the user directory since doing so might lock me out. The solution was to create an admin account that used the internal user database. Be sure to give the admin user the correct group permissions to be able to administer Confluence. Then it was just a matter of logging out of Confluence as myself, logging back in as the locally created admin user and easy as pie we could edit the user directory configuration.

Go figure.