Dale Strickland-Clark wrote:

We have a strange case of a user disappearing from the acl_users folder.

The user used to be there and has been using the web site for some months but today, she reports that she has lost her permissions. Investigation revealed that her user id had disappeared from acl_users (it was the only one in there) at that folder level.

Using the ZMI, I added her back in and it all seemed OK but then I realised I had given her the wrong role. I went back and corrected the role but she disappeared again.

Now, even though the folder is showing "There are no users defined", when I try and add her back in, I get "A user with the specified name already exists".

I experimented a bit more.

I added another user and gave it Manager role. I can't delete this one.

I added another user and gave it one of our roles, Reviewer (the same as the original ghost user). This one vanished immediately.

Can anyone offer any clues as to what might be happening here? Is it safe to delete and re-create the acl_users folder?

Thanks for any help.

Dale, I remember something odd like this from like 2 years ago ... did you delete a role that had been used previously for that user? If so, try re-adding even if its no longer used and see if that changes anything. Or maybe you could check the security settings for that folder (and all folders above) and see if there are orphaned roles and clean them up. David ps Or you could upgrade to a more current version of Zope and maybe it will just go away ...

It *sounds* like you might be behind some sort of load balancer that's talking to completely different Zope instances depending on some randomness. Is there only one Zope instance in play here? - C On Jun 1, 2006, at 6:53 PM, Dale Strickland-Clark wrote:

We have a strange case of a user disappearing from the acl_users folder.

The user used to be there and has been using the web site for some months but today, she reports that she has lost her permissions. Investigation revealed that her user id had disappeared from acl_users (it was the only one in there) at that folder level.

Using the ZMI, I added her back in and it all seemed OK but then I realised I had given her the wrong role. I went back and corrected the role but she disappeared again.

Now, even though the folder is showing "There are no users defined", when I try and add her back in, I get "A user with the specified name already exists".

I experimented a bit more.

I added another user and gave it Manager role. I can't delete this one.

I added another user and gave it one of our roles, Reviewer (the same as the original ghost user). This one vanished immediately.

Can anyone offer any clues as to what might be happening here? Is it safe to delete and re-create the acl_users folder?

Thanks for any help. -- Dale Strickland-Clark Riverhall Systems Ltd - www.riverhall.co.uk _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )

Dale Strickland-Clark wrote at 2006-6-1 23:53 +0100:

... Now, even though the folder is showing "There are no users defined", when I try and add her back in, I get "A user with the specified name already exists".

I experimented a bit more.

I added another user and gave it Manager role. I can't delete this one.

I added another user and gave it one of our roles, Reviewer (the same as the original ghost user). This one vanished immediately.

Can anyone offer any clues as to what might be happening here? Is it safe to delete and re-create the acl_users folder?

Looks like a difficult problem. Difficult problems are best addressed by debugging. Python contains an (archaic) debugger in it runtime library ("pdb") and there are howtos to use it for Zope debugging. If you are unfamiliar with Python debugging, a (commercial) IDE may help you. Colleagues of mine are very satisfied with the commercial (!) WingIDE. -- Dieter