Workgroup Manager – can’t edit a user’s Short Name

Workgroup Manager on OS X Server has always been an awful piece of work. Starting with the bug(feature?) where if you enter your credentials in wrongly it will never let you authenticate unless you quit it and start it again. But I digress. Right now I’m trying to remove, or change, the “Short Name” of one of the users – me. I currently have ‘jessereynolds’ as the original, unmodifiable short name, which is fine. The one I want to get rid of is ‘jesse’ and it lets me edit it in the UI but as soon as I click Save, I get an obscure error pointing at a line of Objective C code in a Workgroup Manager plugin. Helpful! Here it is:

Got unexpected error

Error of type eDSSchemaError (-14142) on line 577 of /SourceCache/WorkgroupManager/WorkgroupManager-319.2.2/Plugins/UserAccounts/UserBasicPluginView.mm

I can happily add new shortnames to my user record, and save them. And I can alter them. No problems. I just can’t alter or remove the one that I need to.

The LDAP log has the following error:

Mar 15 16:13:19 daffy slapd[76]: entry failed schema check: value of naming attribute ‘uid’ is not present in entry

So, great, the directory server has corrupted my ldap record I guess.

Details: Mac OS X Server 10.5.8, Workgroup Manager 10.5.5 (319.2.2). Logged in as a different administrator account (not my own account).

Workaround:

Enable the Inspector tab in Workgroup Manager, and find the RecordName attribute, expand it, and edit it in there. It still gives the above error, but seems to save OK.