Mac OS X Keychain Problems & Adium

[02 Sep 2024: This post previously appeared on an earlier iteration of this web site, and has retroactively resurrected at its old URL.]

Recently, I decided to change the password on my instant messenger accounts to something much more secure than the one I’ve been using for so many years.

After changing my passwords on the web, I went updated the accounts in Adium on Mac OS X Leopard. It all seemed normal; however, Adium prompted me to re-enter my passwords when connecting to any of the changed accounts. I would type in the new password, select the option to save it, but it just wouldn’t stick. Happened every time.

I remembered that Adium uses the Mac OS X keychain, which is a built-in password and certificate store. You access it via the Keychain Access utility. Once in there, I searched for “Adium” in the search bar and found my password entries. I changed the passwords, clicked Save Changes, and it still didn’t work.

At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Obviously, something had to be wrong with my keychain for the Keychain Access utility to not even work, let alone Adium.

After doing a little research on Google, I learned that Keychain Access has a nice feature called Keychain First Aid to diagnose and fix problems. Sure enough, it found something wrong, and was able to fix it fast.

My problem was that the owner of my keychain file wasn’t set to me. Since I didn’t own the file and the permissions were apparently set so only the owner (who wasn’t me) could make changes, Adium and Keychain Access weren’t able to update my passwords.

I’ve no clue why there was a problem with my keychain file and this doesn’t explain why I’ve not had problems elsewhere. None-the-less, it’s fixed the problem and Adium can now log into all of my accounts just fine.

Yay!

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