Posted in Apple/Mac OS

Mac OS X : login keychain locked when screensaver activates ?

February 10, 2009 - 4 comments

I’ve been running Mac OS X at home for the past two months.

I somewhat tightened Mac OS X security by disabling automatic logins, setting a password on the screensaver and such.. the usual steps.

Somehow I set the system in the way that whenever I log in, the keychain will be automatically unlocked in the process. I actually don’t want to type two (identical) passwords in a row..

For some reason when the screensaver was starting, the login keychain was automatically locked again, despite the system settings. Tedious when you lock your session (by starting the screensaver by moving the cursor in the lower right corner of the screen) even when leaving your desk for 30 seconds..

After some googling, I finally stumbled upon the solution at this link
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070927204456413

SSHKeychain was guilty.

So if you don’t want to lock your keychain when the screensaver starts :
- open SSHKeychain
- go in Preferences
- go under the Security tab
- select “Use custom security settings”
- Under “On screensaver” set the action you like. I set “No action”.

Voilà ! :-)

Comments

Jeremy

April 4, 2009 - 19:36

Thanks! I’ve been trying to figure that out for months and almost gave up!

Sebastien Wains

April 5, 2009 - 21:14

Glad it helped :-)

Remco

October 21, 2009 - 23:03

Woohoo, thanks! I was irritated by this behaviour for some time now, but couldn’t find it anywhere in system preferences, not knowing that SSHKeychain was guilty of this!

Thanks so much for posting this!

Sébastien Wains

October 28, 2009 - 23:49

Cool, this post helped two people :D

I no longer use SSHKeychain since Snow Leopard, which has its own ssh agent (less featured but oh well)

Trackback URI Comments RSS

Leave Comment

Please consider visiting the partners below if you enjoyed this article :

If this post saved you time and money, please consider checking my Amazon wishlist.

Before submitting, some rules :
- Is your comment related to the article ?
- You're having a problem ? Have you checked Google, other howtos, docs, manpages ?
- You're still having the problem ? Have you raised log verbosity, checked traces, ran tcpdump ?
- Have you checked your configuratoin for typo ?
Unless your comment is providing additional info or respect the rules above, DON'T comment.
If you don't understand what you are doing, I urge you to read the documentation, I'm not your free Level 1 helpdesk guy.