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Keychains: iCloud, Login, Local Items. Keeping control of what goes where…

Hi everyone,

I wanted to test iCloud keychain with OS X and iOS, but I’m not quite sure how to retain control of what goes where. After enabling iCloud Keychain on the Mac the new Local Items keychain, which can be seen in Keychain Access, changed to iCloud and it did import lots of entries, supposedly from ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain. It did not import everything and I have yet to figure out on what it bases its importing. I wanted to start fresh so I deactivated iCloud Keychain on all devices and let it delete the data on the devices while doing so.

Problem is that my login.keychain now did miss a lot of entries which seem to have been moved to the now emtpy iCloud Keychain (which got of course renamed to Local Items after deactivation). So I went back to an older state of my login.keychain from my backup. With iCloud Keychain still deactivated Mail.app for example now insists that it does not have the passwords for my mail accounts. Even thought they are there and correct in my login keychain. When I enter the passwords in Mail’s password prompt window they always go to Local Items instead of Login.

I tried to move the mail account entries to the Login keychain which seems to work fine, but once I do so Mail refuses to see them and insists on letting me enter the passwords again in order to save them to Local Items. 😐 I would like to use iCloud keychain to share a few website logins between my Mac and my iPhone, but I want to keep most of my logins exclusively local on the Mac. Any ideas how to accomplish that?

Other logins that are only in the Login Keychain do still work fine, for example online banking logins in Safari or FTP logins in Transmit. So as a first step I would like to have Mail.app play nice as well.

Any help, light-shedding or direction-pointing greatly appreciated!

Björn

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 2:18 PM

17 replies

Apr 24, 2014 6:49 AM in response to ajsul

It is an Actiontech router, running up to date default firmware. WEP 128 bit is enabled (yes, I know WEP s-u-c-k-s, but WPA doesn't work with my older wireless printer). I have tried resetting to factory settings, with no change. No other routers nearby. This issue only occurs at home.

I am fairly certain that it is not my router. I was able to reconnect to my password protected wifi on my iPad after restoring an earlier backup that did not have iCloud keychain enabled.

I can also connect to my router with my iPhone if I turn off the router password.

Before I could restore my iPad, I had to turn off the Find my iPhone/iPad feature, which you can not do without being able to connect to iCloud. Well I couldn't connect to my wifi because of the issue with iCloud keychain, so I used my iPhone to create a personal hotspot and was able to connect my iPad to that just fine.

I can also connect my iPhone to my work wifi without any issues.

It seems as if iCloud keychain is blocking/not syncing my wifi password at home and will not allow my iPhone to connect.

Oct 2, 2015 6:54 AM in response to Björn Herrmann

Hi there, it's an old question I know, but I noticed it too when Mavericks was released and I hated it. I was curious if maybe El Capitan "fixed" this. But of course the "old" and imo consistent behaviour still isn't back with El Capitan. I'll never return. It must be intentional. Seems this is what Apple likes to do these days: Break consistent and well working features in favour of the cloud, iOS... whatever.

Keychains: iCloud, Login, Local Items. Keeping control of what goes where…