Fix exception with Logging and verify_username

During testing we found a couple of issues. One if the debugging flag (--debug) was not used, it would throw an excpetion with a missing LOG variable.

The second issue, some of the usernames in our environemnt are not what the username verification function was expecting. Temporarily remove the verification so all of the users would be created properly.

(cherry picked from commit 84c6b60e)