I stumbled upon this issue recently: somebody has created an admin user in a fresh Jenkins installation (most likely, through the normal Jenkins interface). However, after a few days, they couldn’t login as the admin , seeing this error:

admin is missing the Overall/Read permission

I couldn’t find a definite answer to the issue online. So I ssh d into the jenkins box to see if I could figure something out there. I did.

In the $JENKINS_HOME directory, /Users/Shared/Jenkins/Home/ in my case, there is the users/ directory which stores some user info, and it had an admin directory. So far so good. The user seemed to be alive.

I went to $JENKINS_HOME/config.xml and it had permission tags like this:

<permission>hudson.model.Computer.Build:Admin</permission>
<permission>hudson.model.Computer.Configure:Admin</permission>
<permission>hudson.model.Computer.Connect:Admin</permission>
Do you see any inconsistency? Yes, the Admin user here starts with a capital letter for some reason. Could that be a problem? I changed all Admin to admin in the file and restarted Jenkins:

sed -i '' -e 's/:Admin/:admin/g' Home/config.xml
launchctl stop org.jenkins-ci
launchctl start org.jenkins-ci
Sure enough, the login issue is fixed!
  
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Hi there! Nice to have you here.
  
My name is Eugene and I'm a software developer. This blog is about my thoughts, discoveries, and experiences in IT, computers, software development, and maybe something else. My current programming languages: php, Haskell, typescript, shell scripting; I'm also familiar with Swift, Objective-C, Python, Java.