OS X not saving passwords?
// April 8th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // RC Tips, Software
About a month ago I noticed that passwords weren’t being saved in apps in OS X like Safari, Omniweb, etc. I didn’t bother trying to figure out the problem, until today when I would go to a site in Safari and it would ask to save the password. I said yes everytime, but it still didn’t save it. Finally I tracked down this blog post, OS X Keychain Not Saving Passwords…:
I struggled with this one for about a month before I finally dug into what was wrong and how to fix it. It all started when I reinstalled because I couldn’t get BootCamp installed because of volume fragmentation. Since then, my applications, specifically Mail.app and Adium, weren’t remembering passwords even if I checked the little “remember†box.
Basically, for some reason, the keychain file at ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain was now owned by root instead of by me. To check and fix from the commandline ($ is the command prompt):
$ ls -l ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
-rw-r--r-- 1 ryan admin 781380 Apr 8 11:17 (*deleted...*)
My username is ryan. If it says anything else, use the following to change the ownership:
$ sudo chown ryan ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
It will ask for the administrator password, and then change the ownership of the file. I don’t think repair permissions in Disk Utility would fix this problem.
