KB-1207 Users are unable to log in to Appian and a "User does not exist" error is thrown in the application server log

Symptoms

Certain users are unable to login to the site and fail with the following error in the logs:

ERROR com.appiancorp.security.auth.AppianPortalSessionAuthenticationStrategy - com.appiancorp.suiteapi.common.exceptions.InvalidUserException: User does not exist

Running a checkengine -s -u lists the missing user in its output as well.

Cause

This usually happens when the users aren’t propagated across all engines.

If the rename plugin was used for this user, do NOT follow the action listed below. Open a support case to investigate this further.

If this is after a migration, verify the logs of type db_*.log for all Appian engines and confirm the migration message appears on all of them and that the ID of the engine database file *.kdb corresponds to the migrated one.

Action

Run the checkengine script with the cu flags, so it would look like ./checkengine.sh -cu. If you execute this script after running the Rename User plug-in, this could cause further problems. Please open a support case if the above symptoms come up after running the missing user plug-in.

More information on the checkengine script can be found here

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 16.1 and earlier.