Keychain Won’t Remember Router Administrative Password

keychainNetworkpasswordroutersafari

macOS High Sierra, Safari 11.1.2, MacBook Air mid-2013, Netgear R6400 wifi router. All the software on the computer and router is up to date. Both the Mac and Safari work without difficulty.

The network works fine, the computer connects easily (either via wifi or Ethernet), and except for this one issue I can access the router's administrative web pages and change its settings without difficulty.

The issue is…Keychain won't remember the router's administrative password. The router's administrative login page has a box to check to "Remember this password," which I dutifully check. The password is remembered for a few minutes only, then I have to manually enter it again. It's a complicated password, and I'd be happy if Keychain remembered it, as it does for every other password I use.

I've quit and restarted Safari, deleted the Keychain entry for the router (and all other 192.xxx.x.x URLs, there weren't many), deleted Safari’s cache and cookies related to this URL, quit and restarted Keychain, restored the router .cfg file from backup, and restarted the computer in Safe Mode followed by deleting the Keychain entry again.

The forgetfulness continues. Any idea why this is happening? Anything else I might try to fix it?

Best Answer

The 'forgetfulness' is likely to be intentional.

Safari won't offer to remember any passwords etc if the page tells it not to.
I don't know the technical details of how this is accomplished, but banking pages etc won't do it either.
The 'remember' box on the page is not for Safari to remember, it's for the remote device.

There used to be a freeware extension called 'autocomplete' that would disable this [lack of] functionality in Safari, but it hasn't worked so well in recent years.
I just discovered the author now has a paid version, called StopTheMadness, still fully supported, which might do the same thing. I haven't been able to fully test it yet - just got it 5 minutes ago.

Related Solutions

Keychain won’t remember the SSH password when connecting to server

There is a lot of conflicting information I've read whenever I look up information on using ssh-agent (passphrase saving/reusing process) under Mac OS X. Most resources seem to suggest that simply issuing ssh-add -K will let you store your passphrase, and will automatically configure OS X to launch ssh-agent automatically and load your stored passphrase.

Note: Running ssh-add -K will only work if you have your private key file in one of the common locations, those locations being limited to: ~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa, ~/.ssh/identity. If the file is located anywhere else you should specify that path after the -K in the command above.

The reason you are getting the key file passphrase dialog when connecting to the second (key-less) server is likely because the default configuration of SSH servers is to use public key authentication first, and 'keyboard interactive' authentication second.

Because you have a public key with a standard name/location (~/.ssh/id_rsa), your OpenSSH client helpfully submits the private key in order to allow the server to match it against an allowed authorized_keys file.

There are a small handful of ways to prevent this, the easiest two being to pass a flag on the command line, or add it as a permanent configuration item in your ~/.ssh/config file.

When connecting to the secondary/key-less server, you can add -o "PubkeyAuthentication=no" when connecting. Something like ssh -o "PubkeyAuthentication=no" me@devserver2.
Open up ~/.ssh/config in your favorite text editor, create it first if you must, and enter the following:
```
Host devserver2  
    User me  
    PubkeyAuthentication no
```

Now, if you simply type ssh devserver2 the username and pubkey configuration will be read in and used, and you should be prompted for your password and nothing else.

(Note: Replace devserver2 with the actual hostname of the server. Alternatively, pick a nice hostname, such as devserver2, and add a property between User and PubkeyAuthentication called 'Hostname' and put the name or IP address of the server there. Afterwards, you actually can simply type 'ssh devserver2' and all the configuration properties will work their respective magic.)

IOS – How to tell Mobile Safari to stop remembering to never remember the password

Manually enter your username and password. Tap "Passwords" right above your keyboard. Tap "Save This Password." It still won't autofill when you first load the page, but now you can tap in the username field and hit "Autofill Password." There seems to be no way to actually reset the "Never for this site" setting. Sounds like a job for http://apple.com/feedback.

Best Answer

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Keychain won’t remember the SSH password when connecting to server

IOS – How to tell Mobile Safari to stop remembering to never remember the password

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