Error trying to delete user in Confluence
Asked by Art:

When I try to delete a user in Confluence, I get this error:

"there was an error during user deletion java.net.UnknownHostException:""

The FQDN used when the Confluence server was first installed had a .com as its TLD extension. It has since been changed to a .internal name (identical to the .com name except for the substitution of 'internal' for 'com' .) It appears that Confluence is searching for the .com name.

Is there any way to delete a user at this point? I need to reduce the number of licensed Confluence users.

Thank you for your help.


Answers:
author: Robert Wen_ReleaseTEAM_
body: If you're really concerned about licensed users, the easier way is to remove them from the group that defines product access. The standard group is "confluence-users".

Deleting users presents its own set of challenges, especially if you want to retain history of who created a specific page.

comments: author: Art
body: Thanks Robert. Within Conf Adminstration, under Global Permissions, I see that the 'confluence-users' 'group is empty except for the Administrator account; I also see we have a number of groups there, populated with user accounts, and the groups have various permissions assigned.

I had tried removing a user from one of these groups, and while the attempt seemed to succeed, the list of groups assigned to that user did not change. The group membership was being repopulated from the Jira sync, I believe.

Thanks for your help!


author: Kishan Sharma
body: Hi [@Art](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4437453)

You are getting the error because DNS lookup is failing, please refer [this KB article](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/java-net-unknownhostexception-exceptions-in-confluence-log-file-due-to-dns-lookups-failing-394465548.html) on how to resolve it.

Deleting users from database requires multiple steps, you can refer them [on this page](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/right-to-erasure-in-confluence-server-and-data-center-962342412.html#RighttoerasureinConfluenceServerandDataCenter-Workarounds).

comments: author: Art
body: Thank you Kishan. By the way, the error shows that Confluence is trying to contact our Jira server (which has also been renamed in the same manner as the Confluence server was renamed. The full error was:

" there was an error during user deletion java.net.UnknownHostException: jira.ourdomain.com "

So I added (to the Confluence server's hosts file--running on Windows server 2016 datacenter) the IP address for the Jira server and the old, incorrect name for the jira server (which is 'jira.ourdomain.com') . And I tried deleting (from within Confluence administration) the same user as before (whose Active Directory user account was deleted yesterday.) I see a new error:

"There was an error during user deletion: Transaction has rolled back because it has been marked as roll-back only"

The Atlassian support page doesn't show any results for my search when combined with "user deletion". Running Confluence 7.0.1.


author: Art
body: Update: I disabled (under User Directories in Conf administration) the sync that was set up between Conf and our Remote Jira Directory on our Jira server. The license count immediately reflects the Disabled status all of the user accounts that showed as Disabled in Conf adminstration, but that were still assigned a license. Now we have more than a dozen usable licenses available again.

The Conf user account I was attempting to delete is gone--does not appear in a Search of users.

Thank you for your help!


Tags: confluence-server

server