Comments on: Check Your Keychain

By: Geoff Hutchison

Geoff Hutchison — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:45:46 +0000

Daniel,

I experienced this bug during the Leopard seeds and reported it, along with my analysis and a workaround (as you describe above). I’m saddened that it didn’t get fixed before the release.

In my case, Keychain couldn’t even access the “login.keychain” version which Leopard installed. So I immediately knew something was wrong.

I’m wondering if it only affects those of us who used 10.0, considering the comments in this thread?

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:50:04 +0000

Ash: In my experience the safest way is:

1. Duplicate the existing Keychain item in the Finder and rename the copy
2. Double click it to open/import into Keychain access
3. Make the duplicate the new “default” item (it becomes bold)
4. Delete the old keychain from Keychain access

Make mondo backups of all your keychains before doing anything, of course.

By: Ash Ponders

Ash Ponders — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:24:39 +0000

mine is called “butterfly” even though that hasn’t been my username for ages.
Can I just rename it?

By: Scott Fannen

Scott Fannen — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:13:54 +0000

I had the same thing - I had some problem where it couldn’t save to keychain so I went in there and had the same things - it took a few “first aids” to make it happy though.

Complete with the old timer keychain, the missing suffix and so forth :)

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:03:22 +0000

Thanks for this, Daniel - I haven’t run this in a while, and it did find errors when I actually checked. I wish it was easier to manage keychains…particularly, importing and exporting.

By: Grady Haynes

Grady Haynes — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:00:56 +0000

Oh yeah, meant to say that I’ve been a fairly heavy Keychain user since at least the days of 10.1 and I’ve never had corruption at all. Just ran First Aid and it didn’t find anything wrong. I wonder what’s messing yours up.

By: Grady Haynes

Grady Haynes — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:59:45 +0000

My Leopard install experience was marred by my user account having its administrative privileges removed (fortunately another users account on the machine still was an administrator) and its keychain, which formally was named the same as my user account, seemingly renamed to “login” and made undefault.

No major issues since discovering and fixing these two, so I’m happy, but many people would have found themselves stuck.

By: Robert 'Groby' Blum

Robert 'Groby' Blum — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:44:36 +0000

Hey, thanks for listing this. I already followed Apple’s TN on Keychain/Leopard, but this solves a few more problems.

There are still certificate issues, but it’s getting closer. I guess this is one of the reasons why the poor bugreport site is crashing all the time, too - too many bugs in Leopard.