Man, work has been crazy lately.
Sadly, there’s been no time for GTweet-ing, but hopefully I can implement some planned features when my day job calms down a bit.
In the mean time I wanted to post a quick note about a fix for a problem that has been dogging my Mac: namely, that it doesn’t like to remember passwords anymore.
I first noticed the problem when Coda couldn’t seem to remember the FTP password to one of my sites. At first I thought it was an issue with Coda, but the problem began to show itself more frequently and across multiple applications.
I googled around a bit and found this article which recommends checking the permissions on the login.keychain file in ~/Library/Keychains.
As it turns out my permissions were out of whack, but I wasn’t comfortable using the standard chown command to take ownership of the file. I have found myself locked out of my keychain once before and it is not a pleasant experience.
Thankfully, the Keychain Access application in /Applications/Utilities folder provides a Keychain First Aid function to repair potential problems, including file ownership issues.
MacFixIt has extensive instructions for keychain troubleshooting, but the following is all that was needed in my case:
- Launch the Keychain Access application in the /Applications/Utilities folder
- Go to the Keychain Access menu and select Keychain First Aid
- Enter your username and password
- Click the Repair button
After running Keychain First Aid my passwords immediately began to save properly, no restart needed.