Discussion on:

Snow Leopard keychain and password administration 101

Thanks for a great "Intro to Keychains" article.

One thing that I noticed is that someone (perhaps an editor) changed slashes to backslashes in the Keychain paths in the article. Mac OS X uses the same path delimiter as Unix/Linux, namely a slash ("/"). The article mistakenly substitutes a Windows-like backslash ("\").

The other note is regarding changing a user's password with the OS X DVD. What that will work to get into a normal user account if you have physical access to the machine, if that user is FileVaulted, it will still not get you to their data. The only way to a FileVaulted user's data is with the user's original password, or by using the "Master" password, if it was set by IT or the user and is known. Otherwise, the FileVaulted data is inaccessibly encrypted and essentially gone.

I never thought it was this easy! I'll keep a note of this.

Nice work but ... what if you've forgotten the keychain's password?

I am currently trying to figure out how to upgrade software and the password is not correct. The password I use to unlock the machine on startup works, but nothing else.

I am unable to use Keychain First Aid as the system will not accept my password.

Currently, I have a 16GB Mac Pro which sits waiting for new software but no matter which password I use, it still refuses to accept them.

I've tried the reboot from the System disc but that's fine if you want to change the passwords and not the keychain.

Any ideas?

Is there anyway to auto-update certain passwords when the main keychain password is updated? For instance, if I change my work network password, I have to shut the Mac down, hard-wire it to the network, login with the new password, update the keychain password with the new one, and then manually update my Exchange and WPA passwords in the keychain. I want those two passwords to always be the same as the main keychain password.