"Delete-User" results in the error, "Multiple users with that username found in CF"

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

When PCF Operator attempts to delete a user account, it results in failure:

#cf delete-user foo@bar
Error deleting user foo@bar
Multiple users with that username found. Please use 'cf curl' to delete the user by guid instead.

Environment

Cause

There are duplicate users with the same user-name. CAPI cannot safely remove a user from the username since they are not unique. Therefore the user must be removed by GUID instead.

Resolution

The user needs to be removed manually both by `cf curl` and by `uaac` client.

Follow the steps to resolve this issue:

1. List the users and find the GUID for the user that you want to delete: 

cf curl /v2/users |egrep "name|guid|created_at"

2. Confirm the metadata of a GUID that you want to delete:

cf curl /v2/users/hM83mPEEp8BWMNohM5-cHZPy33gszsRt

3. Delete the user by GUID with the command:

cf curl -X DELETE /v2/users/hM83mPEEp8BWMNohM5-cHZPy33gszsRt

4. Now log into uaac client with UAA admin credentials (Elastic Runtime > Credentials > UAA Admin credentials).

Note: This article assumes that Elastic Runtime is configured for internal authentication. If you are using LDAP/SAML then it will be necessary to delete user record manually from the external identity provider.

Reference: https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/uaa/uaa-user-management.html

5. Find the id of the user you wish to delete:

uaac users 'username eq "[e-mail]" and origin eq "uaa"'

6. Delete the userID with the command: 

uaac curl -XDELETE -H"If-Match: *" /Users/<insert user_id_here>  

The user is now deleted.