If you, like me, have essentially kept a single keychain from the dawn of time, there’s a feature in the Keychain Access application you need to know about: “Keychain First Aid.”<\/p>\n
\nYou find it under the Keychain Access menu, just below Preferences. Whenever I see anything unusual happening with my keychain, I try to remember to hop into Keychain Access and re-run this. Putting aside the question of why my keychain is allowed to get so routinely screwed up that it requires “first aid,” let me say that I appreciate this repair functionality because it generally solves problems quickly and effectively.\n<\/p>\n
\nStarting with Leopard 10.5, I saw some really strange behavior. Sometimes keychain seemed to contain my web passwords, for instance, and sometimes not. I hopped into Keychain Access and did the first first aid dance. Whoah, mega-red warnings. The first thing that stood out for me is that I somehow had come into a situation where I have two keychains named “daniel”, each configured as part of my keychain search list.\n<\/p>\n
\nIt turns out that in my ~\/Library\/Keychains folder there exist two keychain files, but one of them contains the “.keychain” extension, while the other does not. I suspect what happened is at some point (in 10.5?) Apple decided to require that keychains have this file extension, so they quietly upgraded my existing keychain without removing the original. This explains my feeling that keychain was mysteriously showing duplicates for many keychain items!<\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nWhat’s really mysterious though is the way it continued to access both keychains, apparently sometimes choosing from one and sometimes from the other. It made me wonder which was most up to date, but I couldn’t really guess since each had recent modified dates. I picked one and moved the other to the side as a “backup.” Now I’ve got a single “daniel” keychain, and everything should be fine. If I find myself missing a password, I’ll have to rename the backup to “bogus” or something, import it to Keychain Access, and search it for the password to copy over into the one-true-keychain.\n<\/p>\n \n(Note: Unless you’re a really old-timer like me, chances are your “daniel” keychain is called “login”. It’s probably wisest to keep it this way, because Apple’s First Aid also seems to get upset sometimes if there isn’t a keychain in the search list with that name. I stubbornly refuse to change, for now.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you, like me, have essentially kept a single keychain from the dawn of time, there’s a feature in the Keychain Access application you need to know about: “Keychain First Aid.” You find it under the Keychain Access menu, just below Preferences. Whenever I see anything unusual happening with my keychain, I try to remember […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-macintosh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}