Mac OS X ’s keychain scheme is a great lineament , but there are times when it does n’t behave quite the way it should . Sometimes your keychain single file develop modest corruption , and a warm test of Keychain Acccess ’ Keychain First Aid function patches affair in good order up . But other times more tortuous troubleshooting is call for .
At some point back in April or May , my MacBook Pro developed a filthy keychain - related problem tie in to Personal File Sharing . After a batch of surety and other updates , whenever I tried to colligate to one of the other reckoner on my home internet , I ’d get the now - conversant dialog submit — and I ’m paraphrasing here—“[XYZ ] has been updated ; do you need to update the keychain to let approach ? ”
( Basically , this is OS X ’s way of enjoin , “ have got on , married person ; there ’s a new interpretation of XYZ on your automobile that want the same access to your watchword that the old version had . ” If you ’ve indeed update XYZ recently , you agree and get on with your day . But if youhaven’tinstalled a fresh interlingual rendition , or set up an OS X update that did so , this is a warning that there might be some kind of malware posing as that program in purchase order to gain access code to passwords . )
Since I ’d just installed an update that strike file sharing , I sink in the push to approve the update to my keychain , and then waited … and waited … and waited . The duologue remained on the screen and the entire figurer became unresponsive . My MacBook Pro was effectively a braggy , lustrous paperweight . mean this was a random glitch , I force - restarted , go back up and running , and tried to connect again . And watch the political machine freeze down up again . And restarted again . essentially , the computer worked flawlessly until I tried to connect to another Mac for which I ’d previously save my file - sharing password to the keychain . Such attempt resulted in Beachball Bonanza .
( I finally hear that if I waited 15 to 20 minutes , the dialog went aside and I retrieve ascendance . But who wants to wait that long to link to another reckoner when they ’re trying to get workplace done ? )
After a few more lie with - my - promontory - against - the - wall attempts , I gave up . I was too busybodied to drop the time necessary to isolate the cause , so I put the trouble on the back burner and just avoided relate directly to any shares . Thanks to DropCopy , I was capable to transfer Indian file to other Macs , but I was still queasy to be able-bodied to use stock file cabinet communion again .
Then , last calendar week , I happened to hail across aninteresting articleover at Unsanity.com . write back in January , it described a similar keychain - authorisation job experienced by an Unsanity staffer . Except , unlike me , the staffer had the prison term — or at least the unbridled peculiarity — to track down the job .
As it move around out , the cause in that casing was a debased file late inside the inconspicuous / vardirectory ; specifically,/var / db / CodeEquivalenceDatabase . Because of this corruption , securityd — a background summons that cover keychain approach — kept try and trying to get at the file cabinet , sucking up RAM in the process and finally overwhelming even OS X ’s impressive memory management organization , grinding the system to a stop . Deleting this file fixed the problem .
Figuring I had nothing to lose , I launch the appropriate directory ( by using the Finder ’s Go To Folder mastery and typing / var / db ) and moved the fileCodeEquivalenceDatabaseto the Trash ( which required me to provide my decision maker name and countersign ) . I then restarted . As Steve Jobs would say , “ Boom ! ” The job was buy the farm . And I noticed no ominous effects from deleting the file .
So thanks to Unsanity , I can now access my other Macs from my MacBook Pro . And you , the proofreader , can visit the original Unsanity article and get a glimpse of the troubleshooting come near the pro use ; specifically , the use of thefs_usagecommand .
