chef-server-ctl user-create throws error if email address has a . in it about chef-server

[jstange]

Hm, no, it's weirder than that... my own personal address ([email protected]) also breaks it, but [email protected] does not. Other variations of email addresses fail or succeed in a pattern I can't quite explain.

[rpattcorner]

This is a critical bug for our project, rendering our chef-based tool undeployable for the typical user emails we see.

[stevendanna]

@rpattcorner @jstrange Apologies that you haven't gotten a response on this yet. I'll be looking at this today and let you know what I find. If you have time, I'd love if someone with a reproduction case of this could send me ([email protected]) the contents of the /var/log/opscode/oc_erchef/ directory after the failure.

[stevendanna]

@rpattcorner @jstange A quick follow up. In the cases you found, are you certain their are no other users with the given email address in the system. The email address must be unique as well as the username. Unfortunately, it appears the error message returned does not give you an indication that it is actually the email address that is conflicting:

vagrant@private-chef:~$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create foo John Q Public "[email protected]" some_password
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
[...SNIP...]
vagrant@private-chef:~$ sudo chef-server-ctl user-create foobar John Q Public "[email protected]" some_password
ERROR: Conflict
Response: User 'foobar' already exists

Note that I don't have a user foobar in the system, but because the email address conflicts, I get the "Conflict" error message.

[jstange]

That explanation sounds like what I've been seeing. Definitely warrants a better error message...

What's the reasoning behind enforcing uniqueness with email addresses? It seems like a standard use case to have an admin identity that might conceivably be the same person as a regular user, strictly for management tasks. Also multiple users for the same person across orgs, though there are probably better ways to accomplish the latter.

[stevendanna]

@jstange The uniqueness constraint for email addresses was originally put in place for Hosted Chef where password reset (and perhaps other items) are tied to email addresses:

https://www.chef.io/account/password_resets/new

The same user account can be associated with multiple organizations, so normal users typically don't need more than one account; however, there are other use cases where it would be nice to use the same address for multiple accounts.

I'll open a new bug for the error message and then close this one out.

[jstange]

Roger that. We can work around for now by aiming our generic admin user at a local machine address or something. Thanks!

[stevendanna]

Closing in favor of: #59

[Abhsubba]

you may created the org-username my mistake, but every problem has some solution.

sudo -s
chef-server-ctl org-delete learndevops # learndevops is my org-name you may have different