Issue Summary

In Confluence 9.2, after setting up a clustered LDAP user directory, the full and incremental synchronization fails and, as a result, users are not updated in Confluence and some experience login issues.

The clustered LDAP system could be fronted by a Virtual Directory Server (VDS) or any mirroring technology.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Setup a Clustered LDAP system
2. Connect the clustered LDAP system as a User Directory in Confluence
3. Synchronize the User Directory in Confluence

Expected Results

The user directory should be able to perform full and incremental synchronizations without any errors

Actual Results

The synchronization fails with the following error captured in the atlassian-confluence.log file:

2025-07-04 01:55:07,178 INFO [Caesium-1-3] [directory.ldap.util.DirectoryAttributeRetriever] getValueFromExternalIdAttribute Skipping attribute objectGUID because its value <\\uFFFD|\\uBCD7\\u0012/H\\uFFFD(\\uFFFD&qz-\\uFFFD> is not XML safe

2025-07-04 01:56:07,269 ERROR [Caesium-1-1] [atlassian.crowd.directory.DbCachingRemoteDirectory] synchroniseCache Exception occured when performing full synchronization
com.atlassian.crowd.exception.OperationFailedException: No highestCommittedUSN attribute found for AD root

Workaround

Change the directory Implementation class and ldap.external.id.

• Before

  Implementation class: com.atlassian.crowd.directory.MicrosoftActiveDirectory
  ldap.external.id: objectGUID
  

• After

  Implementation class: com.atlassian.crowd.directory.GenericLDAP
  ldap.external.id: entryUUID
  

VDS or other proxies for the ldap system do not expose the attribute that the Microsoft AD Connector is trying to fetch. The generic ldap adapter doesn't use the same method and therefore this issue cannot occur. User directory should sync successfully after this change.