MacOS – Unable to share Wi-Fi passwords with one of the Macs

airdropmacospasswordsharingwifi

I am unable to share any Wi-Fi passwords to one of my Macs.

AirDrop works to share photos / files / web pages
Handoff does work for Safari to hand off an active page
Sharing WiFi passwords certainly does not work at all

Let's call the affected Mac "Mac A". I am able to share passwords from my iPhone to "Mac B" and I am also able to share passwords with other contacts from my iPhone. I am able to share Wi-Fi passwords from "Mac A" to my iPhone, but not the other way around.

When I try to share a password from any device (but using my iPhone as an example) to "Mac A" the iPhone says "Sharing" for about 30 seconds and then shows "Password Not Shared" "There was a problem sharing your Wi-Fi password." I've added a screenshot of the error, just in case that's of use.

I've tried to fix this by:

Signing out of iCloud on all of my devices
"Forgetting" Wi-Fi networks from all of my devices
Restarting all devices
Sign in to iCloud on my iPhone
Connect to my home Wi-Fi network from my iPhone
Connect "Mac A" to the internet via Ethernet
Sign in to iCloud on "Mac A"
Disconnect Ethernet
Attempt to connect to my home Wi-Fi network on "Mac A"
Performed a reinstall of macOS on "Mac A" (using recovery mode)
Erased "Mac A" and performed a clean install of macOS

However, I get the same error. I've also tried resetting "network settings" on my iPhone and then going through the above steps, but that didn't change anything. I kind of didn't expect this to help as the issue appears to be with "Mac A".

I don't know what else to try next with this. Does any one have any ideas on what to try?

Best Answer

I don’t have a fix, but I know this has come up. Also, this is going to be very hard to reproduce your conditions, so it might be a while to solve this. Here’s how I would troubleshoot this, based on a layered approach:

Make sure AirDrop works bilaterally - photos / web page - share back and forth.
Make sure Handoff works bilaterally - safari and messages are good to test
Make sure WiFi handoff works - this uses Handoff to store an item in Keychain / System Preferences

So, for most people, I would expect handoff is the broken piece here and not that the keychain or system preferences app are broken for you.

Also - when A/B testing, it’s very useful to have a C to test - iPhone / iPad or another Mac.

Good luck - with so many variables, you may need a piece of paper or spreadsheet to test the various apps in the various configurations, but WiFi sharing layers on top of handoff which layers on top of AirDrop with iCloud identify certificates to allow Handoff to work. Hopefully you can eliminate iCloud as a cause by signing out and in, but clearing the keychain of signing / identity certificates might be needed - especially if iCloud syncs these down to the Mac A after you erased it.

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IPhone – Share links, notes, and pictures between iPhone and Mac

Apple OSX Mountain Lion has been announced, it includes a few of the iOS apps on the mac desktop such as Notes, Game Center, reminders, twitter and message.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/

File sharing between Mavericks and non-Macs

regarding getting your SMB sharing connection from linux working...

Samba no more, mount.cifs needs extra options, "nounix,sec=ntlmssp"

Don't use the linux gui to connect, have bro open a terminal and try these commands

(and dig my ascii art!)

          =^..^=       `·.¸¸ ><((((º>.·´¯`·><((((º>   

amitsbrother@linux:~$ 
amitsbrother@linux:~$ sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
  ...
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mkdir /mnt/mavericks_smb
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mount.cifs //172.17.8.212/smb_share /mnt/mavericks_smb/ -o user=amitsbrother,password=trustno1,nounix,sec=ntlmssp
amitsbrother@linux:~$ 
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mkdir /mnt/mavericks_smb_dup
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mount -t cifs //172.17.8.212/smb_share /mnt/mavericks_smb-dup -o username=amitsbrother,password=trustno1,nounix,sec=ntlmssp

Once this is working, you can create a script for your brother to automatically mount when it is executed from the gui. Basically, the script is just the mount point creation, and the cifs connection to the smb server... so 2 or 3 lines including the shebang.

Make sharing work now with no passwords

To make it super simple, I'd enable web sharing on the Mac, and put the files you want to share to the Linux box in a folder in ~/Sites/a_folder/ . Then give your brother the address that it tells is your personal web sharing address in the Sharing Preferences pane when you enabled Web Sharing. Tell your brother to open a browser and put in that address; it will give him a directory listing as long as there is no index.html file in there. He can download files with his browser. This is one way sharing, from the Mac to the linux box, and will work fine as long as there are no files over 4GB (unless apache fixed that issue and didn't tell me about it). I believe directory listing is enabled by default on the Mac apache2 server.

To share in the other direction, from linux to Mac, you could do the same from the Linux box:

 sudo apt-get install apache2

You can enable directory listings on the Linux apache2 server with instructions here. Those instructions inadvertantly also cover how to get the apache2 server up and running. Then you need the ip address of the Linux box, and the relative location from the apache root to see the files in your Mac's browser.

This shouldn't take 5 minutes to set up 2 x 1-way sharing through browsers on both boxes, and relieves you from hacing to trouble-shoot the slightly more complex task of installing and configuring netatalk or running SMB sharing from the mac and getting the linux client to mount it, which isn't always a "it just works" situation, like running 2 apache2 servers is.

Best Answer

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