Macos – OS X Keychain Won’t Stop Popping Up

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The OS X Keychain keeps on popping up on my Mountain Lion Macbook. As soon as I log into my user/admin account, I'm assaulted by three Keychain prompts, one after the other:

Messages Agent wants to use the "login" keychain.
Mac OS X wants to use the "login" keychain.
Google Chrome wants to use the "login" keychain.

To my great misfortune, it is not accepting my User (Admin) password. I have no idea why. When I hit cancel, it cycles through these three prompts. I don't know if this is a virus, a Mountain Lion bug, or what.

I would appreciate it very much if someone could help me solve the issue. I have only one user account on my computer, it is the Admin account. The other account is the Guest account, which I am writing on currently. My user account is totally hosed. I can't do anything on it. I can't even reset my keychain. By "hosed" I mean I will try to delete my keychain, and I'll type in my password, but the program will just crash.

Here are some things I have tried:

Deleting the keychain from user account (program crashed when I tried to reset it)
I tried to delete my User/Admin account (remember, they are the same) but when I went to User Accounts, the "minus" sign was grayed out: I could add accounts, but I could not remove my Admin account.
I do not have the install disc, so I don't know how to reinstall OS X without it.

Thanks so much. I have never ever experienced this before. Don't know if it's a virus, or what!

Best Answer

I had the same issue, and this is how I fixed it.

http://www.umkc.edu/is/support/services/macintosh/keychain.asp

The essential message by default your Mac OS logon password is the the same as the keychain password. Each time you change your Mac OS logon password your keychain password is automatically changed.

For me, my mistake, I opened the Keychain Access.app which is located in /Applications/Utilities, and within the menu bar under "Edit" is the option to change your Keychain password. Well, in my case, not knowing that it should remain synchronized with my logon, I attempted to make it, what I thought, was 'more safe' by giving it a different password.

Big mistake. The next time I logged on and attempted to use my Mac anything which had data stored in the keychain - browsers, messages, the OS - compared my logon password and my keychain password and found them to be different. Thus all those pop-up prompts are generated.

The URL has the solution. In short:

Launch Keychain Access
In the upper left corner is a lock, if it is unlocked - good. If it shows locked, click it, and enter the password to unlock the keychain. (you may have to use your old password to unlock it, you may have to cancel one of the symptom pop ups to get the unlock dialog).
On the left side under the heading Keychains, there should be an item named login, click it
From the Edit menu in the menu bar choose 'Change Password for Keychain "login"
In the window that appears, the 'old' password is the 'current' keychain password' - probably something you changed intentionally and possibly recently. For the 'new' password which must be entered twice, enter the password you use for Mac OS login. This will restore the two to be the same and in sync
Restart your mac; those pop-ups will hopefully stop

Non-interactive SSH sessions

If you don't need to have an interactive session on the remote server, you can execute ssh in an environment without tty, e.g. as part of a Run Shell Script action in Automator.

You need to create a program that when called prints the password to standard out, e.g. the following bash script you need to make executable using chmod +x pwd.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "password"

Then, set the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable to the path to this program, and then run ssh in the Automator action, like this:

export SSH_ASKPASS=/Users/danielbeck/pwd.sh
ssh user@hostname ls

When there is no tty, but SSH_ASKPASS and DISPLAY (for X11, set by default) are set, SSH executes the program specified by SSH_ASKPASS and uses its output as password. This is intended to be used in graphical environments, so that a window can pop up asking for your password. In this case, we just skipped the window, returning the password from our program. You can use security to read from your keychain instead, like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
security find-generic-password -l password-item-label -g 2>&1 1>/dev/null | cut -d'"' -f2

ls (on the ssh command line) is the command executed when ssh has logged in, and its output is printed in Automator. You can, of course, redirect it to a file to log output of the program you start.

Interactive SSH sessions using `sshpass`

I downloaded, compiled and installed sshpass and it worked perfectly. Here's what I did:

Get the Apple developer tools
Download and open sshpass-1.05.tar.gz
Open a shell to the directory sshpass-1.05
Run ./configure
Run make
Run make install (you might need sudo for it)

Now the program is installed to /usr/local/bin/sshpass. Execute using a line like the following:

sshpass -pYourPassword ssh username@hostname

You can read the password from security just before doing that, and use it like this:

SSHPASSWORD=$( security find-generic-password -l password-item-label -g 2>&1 1>/dev/null | cut -d'"' -f2 )
sshpass -p"$SSHPASSWORD" ssh username@hostname

Wrap this in a shell function and you can just type e.g. ssh-yourhostname to connect, having it retrieve and enter the password automatically.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Macos – How to reset the Apple keychain password

MacOS SSH – How to Automatically Login to SSH Using Passwords from OS X Keychain

Non-interactive SSH sessions

Interactive SSH sessions using sshpass

Related Question

Interactive SSH sessions using `sshpass`