techblog 

One of the nice applications that comes with OSX is Keychain which allows you to store login and password information securely. However, if you have multiple MACs then you end up with multiple keychains as these are stored as local files. If you are good and only add passwords to one keychain then, you can copy them between computers but if you want to synchronise the keychains between them, then the only way to do this is by a .mac subscription. At the same time you can also synchronise Safari bookmarks, contacts and some other things.

This was not quite as easy as it seems. Synchronising contacts was straightforward, though the software is a pain to use, not up to Apple’s normal standards for usability. For keychains though it all looked to be working but the data would not change.

It took a while to figure this out but the reason is that Apple has changed the default name for keychains and the names on both computers need to be the same for them to synchronise. The old standard was to name the file (found in ~/Library/Keychains) to your username. The new standard is to name the file (in the same place) to login.keychain. So to get it working I had to do the following:

• Rename the old keychain to the new name.
• In Keychain Access, edit the keychain list to remove the old name and add the new name. Then set the new name as the default.
• For good measure I also deleted all the data under ~/Library/Keychains/.syncinfo and all the data on .mac.

All I’m waiting for now is a nice way to do this without using .mac, and to select different synchronisation targets for different keychains, so that we can use a shared keychain amongst teams.