Can’t “Click lock to make changes” after update to BigSur

Make sure you have a corresponding id_rsa.pub or id_dsa.pub in your ~/.ssh directory.

When I had an id_rsa but not a corresponding id_rsa.pub, Mac OS X kept popping up the dialog and remember passowrd in my keychain did nothing.

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -y -f id_rsa > id_rsa.pub

generated the appropriate public key file for me.

If you already had your public file there (rename it to another name) and generate the public key again using the above command, you'll notice that the generated and the old one are not equal. Somehow the older versions of Mac OS X generated a public key that Lion does not like anymore, generating it again fixes that.

For the curious, the key is exactly the same, the part that changes is that there is no "comments" section after the key on the file any longer.

From your symptoms and the lack of any other any evidence within your log files, the origin of your problem is a keyboard mode switch. This keyboard mode switch will only make your password wrongly typed through the login window and not through an ssh access. This remapping of your keyboard might have been caused by command ⌘+space (select previous input source) or command ⌘+alt ⌥+space (select next input source). The 1st one of these 2 key combinations may be easily entered by typing the spacebar on one of its left or right borders, thus pressing the command ⌘ at the same time. This shortcut is defined in:

System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources

This keyboard remapping might also have been done by any other keyboard shortcut defined by Xcode or another application.

To avoid to be trapped by such an invisible keyboard remapping or misbehaviour, here are 2 personnal trick.

1. Within System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Options, for Display login windows as: select Name and password. Hence you will have a possibility to diagnose any wrong mapping or any other misbehaviour of your keyboard within the field Name:. You might try your password there and have a total feedback.

2. Within System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Options, activate the function Show Input menu in login window. This 2nd trick won't help you diagnose a dead key.