Username has changed but keeps reverting to old name

[sydneycroud]

I have a user that recently married and had her last name changed. The name was updated in active directory. In the security settings for a report, I updated to her new name, let's say her old name was smithj, now it is jonesj.  I was able to delete the security setting for the old name and put her new name. However, after a week or so, the username in the system is reverting to smithj.

I found a system table called users, and it had her old name there. I updated the record there to be jonesj and everything appeared fine. However, a week later, the users table entry reverted to smithj and if you try to add her name to the security settings, it can only put the old name.

This is nuts and I have not been able to find a solution.

[v-janeyg-msft]

Hi, @sydneycroud 

When you put the old name in security setting, What error will happen?

Can you add the old name and the new name at the same time?

What is your version RS version?

Are you sure that the name of the user in AD has changed?

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Janey

[sydneycroud]

If I put the old name in, it cannot be found, as it's searching in AD. So, no, I cannot add the old name, but yes, I can add the new name.

The version we have is 15.0.1106.169

Yes, I am 100% sure the username was updated in Active Directory, as multiple apps were affected like outlook and I had to make changes in our database to reflect it.

[v-janeyg-msft]

Hi,  @sydneycroud 

Can you confirm that this problem only occurs to one user, or it will appear as long as the name is changed?

There is an update of RS on the 9th or 10th. You can wait for two days to see if the problem still appears in the new version. 

Download Microsoft Power BI Report Server- September 2021 from Official Microsoft Download Center

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Janey

[sydneycroud]

Thank you, I will look for the release and we will implement it in test once it comes out and then move it to prod. But it would take a few weeks. I will follow up then.

[v-janeyg-msft]

@sydneycroud  Any updates?

[sydneycroud]

Actually, I did some additional checking and found our server admin had scheduled the PowerBi service to restart at 5:00 a.m. on a daily basis. As a test, I restarted the service now and found that as soon as the service restarted, the user's name was reverted to their old name. There must be some process that is happening at the service start time that is causing this to happen.

[v-janeyg-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi, @sydneycroud 

When PBIRS Row Level Security adds an account, it will first traverse the sys.syslogins table. If the account exists in this table, it will first return the user name from this table. If the user is not in the sys.syslogins table, it will call the Windows API to obtain the user name.

Therefore, we will encounter this problem when the old domain account in the sys.syslogins table has not been updated.

The current solution is that once a domain account in the domain is modified, we need to manually update the account name, you can use the following command:

ALTER LOGIN [OldName] WITH NAME = [NewName]

Modify this first and then see if the report server database has changed synchronously, if not, restart the SQL Server instance.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Janey

[sydneycroud]

Thank you Jenny. I believe that was the fix! When I checked the syslogins view, the old name was present. I reset the name per your direction and restarted the PowerBi service. This time, it did not update the name, so this indeed was the fix. Thank you so much for your assistance with this.

[sydneycroud]

We have applied the update in test and will apply in production in the next week or two. However, the name continues to revert several times a week, and I keep changing it back. It seems to happen at 5:00 a.m. for some reason, but can't find anything in the logs that is happening at that time to cause it.

[v-janeyg-msft]

@sydneycroud   It has been updated today. 

Download Microsoft Power BI Report Server- September 2021 from Official Microsoft Download Center

[FarhanAhmed]

Can you please share the further details?

- You have RLS user tables in your data model which contains the name, right?

- The First & Last name of the user in a report coming from RLS user table?

- What is the system table name which you found? {Data Source}

- while adding the user in the security tab, you add their ID instead of name. If you haven't updated his/her ID and updated only their name then you will be able to add them VIA old username since only their name get updated.

[sydneycroud]

Thank you for your questions.  My answers are below

- You have RLS user tables in your data model which contains the name, right? No, this is just using access by Active Directory users.

- The First & Last name of the user in a report coming from RLS user table? -- Not using RLS

- What is the system table name which you found? {Data Source}-- As mentioned, Users

- while adding the user in the security tab, you add their ID instead of name. If you haven't updated his/her ID and updated only their name then you will be able to add them VIA old username since only their name get updated. --It uses Active Directory when you pick the username so it can't find the old name, and because the name reverts, the user can't access the report