Are you facing DirectAdmin error: is not a valid username?

This guide is for you.

Generally, DirectAdmin error: is not a valid username happens if the username length of the account is larger than the value set in the Directadmin configuration file.
Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to resolve DirectAdmin related error.
In this context, we shall look into how to fix this invalid username error message in DirectAdmin.

How to fix DirectAdmin error: is not a valid username ?

Recently, we were migrating the accounts from one DirectAdmin server to another DirectAdmin server.
When we tried to restore some DirectAdmin accounts on the new server, this error occurred.
Most of the accounts were restored successfully.
But some returned this error:

user1 is not a valid username

user2 is not a valid username

The reason for this error to occur is the default setting that is set for the username length.
By default, in DirectAdmin configuration max_username_length is set to 10.

So if the username of an account is having more than 10 characters then this error appears.
Thus, in order to resolve this error, we need to change the value of this setting.
For that, we need to edit the DirectAdmin configuration and set the value of max_username_length to a higher value.
The path of the configuration file is /usr/local/directadmin/conf/directadmin.conf.
So we edit it by running the below command.

[root@server ~]# vi /usr/local/directadmin/conf/directadmin.conf

Next, we find ‘max_username_length’ and edit it as below.

max_username_length=20

Then we save the file and exit the editor.
After that, we run the below command to restart DirectAdmin:

/sbin/service directadmin restart

This resolved the error instantly.

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