HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 4,178
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
Went out on a residential call yesterday, some poor old grandmother in a retirement village. She had an older iMac (on El Capitan, if that matters), and reported the problem as "I can't get to my church's website". Easy enough, right?
Turns out the problem was the church let their security certificate expire. You can bypass the security warning by entering the Mac's admin password, which, you guessed it, she didn't know. After 15 minutes of her searching, I decided to just reset it. Problem solved, sent an email to the church alerting them to the problem and have a nice day. Another happy customer.
This morning we get a call - "Now my email doesn't work!" Back I go and today's problem is just that it is asking for the password and she doesn't know it. I restart the computer and I'm bombarded with several "This program wants to access keychain, put in the keychain login password" dialogs.
Apparently, when I reset the admin password, it scrambled or erased keychain. Neither the new admin password nor the user account password was accepted as the keychain password. So, the only option I could see was to go into keychain preferences and reset it (of course erasing any passwords it knew in the process). The reset noted that it was saving the old keychain, and starting fresh with a new one.
There weren't that many things to deal with, so I just ground through the various programs and re-populated her commonly used passwords.
Finally, the question for the mac folks here, in case this ever happens again: What should I have done to recover or access the existing keychain instead of just starting over?
Turns out the problem was the church let their security certificate expire. You can bypass the security warning by entering the Mac's admin password, which, you guessed it, she didn't know. After 15 minutes of her searching, I decided to just reset it. Problem solved, sent an email to the church alerting them to the problem and have a nice day. Another happy customer.
This morning we get a call - "Now my email doesn't work!" Back I go and today's problem is just that it is asking for the password and she doesn't know it. I restart the computer and I'm bombarded with several "This program wants to access keychain, put in the keychain login password" dialogs.
Apparently, when I reset the admin password, it scrambled or erased keychain. Neither the new admin password nor the user account password was accepted as the keychain password. So, the only option I could see was to go into keychain preferences and reset it (of course erasing any passwords it knew in the process). The reset noted that it was saving the old keychain, and starting fresh with a new one.
There weren't that many things to deal with, so I just ground through the various programs and re-populated her commonly used passwords.
Finally, the question for the mac folks here, in case this ever happens again: What should I have done to recover or access the existing keychain instead of just starting over?