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.