Error is caused by the fact that somehow the group looked for is surrouded by "" so looking for group1 "group1" is searched for. Simpel solution I added in org.apache.catalina.mbeans.UserMBean is the removal of " from the groupname when searching for it. public void addGroup(String groupname) { User user = (User) this.resource; if (user == null) { return; } String lookupGroupname = groupname.replaceAll("\"", ""); Group group = user.getUserDatabase().findGroup(lookupGroupname); if (group == null) { throw new IllegalArgumentException ("Invalid group name '" + lookupGroupname + "'"); } user.addGroup(group); } the only change I made is the adding of replaceAll Sorry for not making a proper patch file but I don't know how to do it. Hope you can implement this solution so adding of groups to a user works.
Thanks for the report. This has been fixed in SVN and will be included in 5.5.21 onwards.
*** Bug 41490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***