Mac not accepting correct password
I’m having a similar problem as Charles Arthur. My Mac is asleep, I wake it up, it asks for the password, I type the correct password (110% sure), and it responds “Wrong password” – over and over again. Only solution is to shut it down. It then takes forever to start up again, but now accepts the same password I’ve been using above. Weird.
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At last, someone not just saying “Uh, repair permissions and say ‘Ming-a-bing-a-ding!”
OK – do you get the other symptoms I’ve seen? Which includes being unable to launch apps (they just bounce, forever, in the Dock), and being told when trying to open a new Terminal window that “the administrator has set your shell to an illegal value”.
Then again, you get locked out right away (you’ve got the password lock on the screensaver, right).
Do you have Menu Extra Enabler installed? Or any other haxies?
No, and that’s the weirdest. No other problems. Apps are running fine, no bouncing-for-half-an-hour in the dock.
And I have not installed Menu Extra Enabler. Or other Haxies.
And yes, I do have the the password lock on the screensaver.
Did the securityd process die? I’ve seen this happen after syncing keyhains with .Mac; rebooting cures it. It doesn’t happen if I don’t let .Mac sync my keychains.
Urr, but Oyvind, if you can’t get past the password lock on the screensaver, you won’t see the “bouncing forever” effect when you try to launch an app when this strange ..event happens.
@Mike – how interesting: I do have .Mac, and it is (was – I’ve unticked it) set to synchronise keychains every week; the last being on Dec 28 at 11.17.
And the last problem I had was on Dec 29.
Can’t find any mention of securityd in the crash logs. This could be the cure – but what’s the cause?
I guess you’re right Charles. But when the screen lock is on, I wouldn’t be able to launch an app, would I?
I’ll do a test: Sync with .mac and then put the Mac to sleep. Could you try it too?
Next step would be: How to fix this? Keep syncing and being able to log in afterwards without restarting…
I think that if Mike is right and it’s related to keychain syncing, that you’d have to change the keychain too – ie add a password.
I’ll leave it off – you see what happens with yours if you add a password and sleep and restart. It may also be that it only comes up with a different network… except you aren’t changing network (are you?) Those are the only times I’ve noticed it, and put it down to that, not to the .Mac stuff.
You could also try turning off the password-on-wake and see if you get the “can’t launch” effect. Having Activity Monitor running previously means you can see what your user name is given as. If it’s ??? you’ve got the problem.
A small test: Mac slept, woke it up, but it didn’t accept password. No sync with .mac since last startup. After restart it has been sleeping several times without trouble waking it up again.
OK.. over at my blog, Eric A has suggested that it is a problem with lookupd, which if you follow that link (to a Google search) turns up lots of things about bugs in it.
I’ll do a fresh post, but Eric’s explanation does cover it all.
lookupd could indeed be the problem, as mentioned in this thread on the Lobotomo User Forum, for IPSecuritas 3.0rc:
http://www.lobotomo.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=IPSecuritas;action=display;num=1167892323
Any of you guys by any chance running IPSecuritas 3.0rc? I am, and I think I started having the problem after I upgraded to 3.0rc.
After I disabled DNS resolving per VPN connection the constant lookupd crashing and restarting seems to have stopped. At least for now…
Regards,
Gunnar
I don’t use IPSecuritas. I have a VPN app installed, but the errors do not show a pattern related to the use of that. Also I have AdmitMac because of the security at work, but I don’t have any whether that adds to the problems.
I had a friend over yesterday, with lots of Linux/PC experience, but no Mac experience. He suggested a caps lock/num lock problem.
On several PCs he had seen that if the num or caps lock were on when it went to sleep, it could be off when it was woken up again. Or the opposite. Without it showing on the actual keyboard.
So I tried checking that, but couldn’t see that it had anything to do with it.
I already checked the NumLock/CapsLock thing. Good idea/suggestion, though.
The thing about IPSecuritas is that it messes with lookupd and the resolver routines of OS X. I would imagine (although I don’t know it for sure), that AdmitMac has to do the same, in order to enable Active Directory lookups.
So that could be our common problem, apps that mess with lookupd.
FWIW, since I disabled IPSecuritas’ DNS functionality I’ve had no more lookupd restarts and I haven’t yet been locked out of OS X again either.
That could of course change at any moment, though.
Regards,
Gunnar
This might be an important clue to getting locked out of OSX when screensaver prompts for passwords. I have the same problem and it’s been driving me nuts even before OSX 10.4.8:
MY OSX 10.4.8 and earlier versions will also deny my password upon trying to exit the screensaver. I can type my user name and it shows correctly on the screen, but my password doesn’t work. No matter what or how I type it. I’m not a novice with Macs and I program in different languages so I do know how case-sensitivity is very important.
So here’s my discovery: what I did then was attempt to shutdown the computer properly : I switched users to another user (which I already had & it had no password on it), then tried to shutdown the computer from that account.
What happens then is that it then asks for an administrator name/password to shutdown the computer (because my account that I couldn’t log into was still running) and when I type my name into this dialog box IT TYPES AS IF THE NUM-LOCK IS ON (but the num-lock light is off on the keyboard). So any the keys “uio jkl m” enter “456 123 0″ respectively. Hitting the num-lock does nothing to change the situation.
This may be a clue to why OSX does not accept passwords on random occasions after waking up from screensaver.
Realize that earlier I said that on the screensaver screen where it wouldn’t originally accept my password, typing the login name does appear correctly instead of getting the num-lock effect. But then when I switched user accounts and tried to shutdown, typing my user name results in the keys responding as if the num-lock is on. Hitting the num-lock does nothing (it does light up to indicate when its on or off).
Perhaps in the screensaver when you type in the user name and password, though it shows up on the screen correctly, the computer is seeing the keyboard input AS IF the num-lock was on.
This is strange and getting locked out after the screensaver runs happens every once in a while and it occurs with different screensavers so I think it’s an OSX problem not the screensaver per se. It doesn’t matter if the computer has been on for a few hours or a few days.
If anyone can replicate this next time they’re locked out, we may be on to something. I can’t believe Apple hasn’t caught this because it happens rarely, but often enough, and in the last few updates to OSX, to make someone wonder if there’s a bug.
I’m joining the conversation a little late but I experience the wrong password response all the time when I wake from a screensaver. I have it set to require a password for when I’m at work. For me it’s about 50-50. When it says the password was incorrect, I just type it again and it works. Now I’ve got in to the habit of hitting the delete key before the entering the password and that always works.
I have not these problems lately. I’m not sure why, but they went away. Weird.
Thanks for the discoverings, Omar.
And it could be as easy as that, Clay. That the buffer just has kept some characters. So that pressing delete clears those before you enter your password. Great advice!
I have the same problem, after wake from sleep the password does not match. But I try to type in the Name field and saw that the problem is that que words in keyboard are changed, i.e: when you type A, another word appear… the problem is with the keyboard…. but I am still with this problem….
Finally I found, I had the same error…
I didn’t foud why this thing happens, but I found how to solve.
Try tip you password in the login name window ( be careful to do not erase it )
If your problem is the same, you will see that the letters that you tip isn’t the same that it shows…
Now you just need to copy the new letter sequence to write your old password.
And It should Work.
I still looking for the problem, but at least I found this work around.
Good Luck
Do any of you use an alternate language keyboard layout? This turned out to be the problem in my case: I was temporarily using a different language before the screen saver kicked in.
Try typing your password in the “Name” box to see what characters are actually being entered.
Do any of you happen to be hardwired and wireless on your home or work network? For me the issue was that when trying to authenticate (with my computer wired, plugged in, and simultaneously connected to the network with wireless) the network tries logging in two times.
To stop just unplug the hired wire, reboot, and log in. Then plug your hardwire back in.
J
Is there a solution for this problem in the mean while? I have this problem for three days now, and I have no clue where it came from or how to fix it. The only thing that does the trick is rebooting, which is very nerve wracking.
I will try all the things mentioned above and come back with those results. Cheers!