Musing

The “Local Items” Keychain In Mavericks

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UPDATE: My fork of ADPassMon has now been merged with main & many changes have been made, for more information follow this link.
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The “Local Items” keychain is something that you may have the misfortune of running into when changing passwords via an external directory service due to password expiry or a using forgetting their passwords in Mavericks.

I spent some time tackling it when forking ADPassMon to not only update Users passwords not via the pref pane, just through ADPassMon, & then also updating the users keychain password.

Below are my observations on the new keychain.

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Mavericks & Preference Caching

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Preference Caching is something that has been within OSX for some time, in Mountain Lion it was quite prominent with plists such as the Dock plist.

When Dockutil 1.1.4 was released it’s major change as noted in the release notes was to restart  this preference caching service called: cfprefsd, without which the settings written to the com.apple.dock.plist would later be overwritten.

So why am I mumbling along about this?

Well, recently i’ve been involved in discussions on this & wanted to post something to give others the heads up in case anyone else struggles with it.

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VPP 2.0 & “A Question Of Morality”

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Back in November last year, I posted some observations VPP 2.0, Mavericks, iLife ’13 & iWork ’13 which highlighted some of the technical difficulties with this new approach.

However, taking a step back we realised that we were going to struggle with licensing the software.

After several discussions with various Apple employees we came to a solution, which was summarised by the Apple employee as “a question of morality.”

So how did the conversations get to that point? Well, let me explain..

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VPP 2.0, Mavericks, iLife ’13 & iWork ’13

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On October 22nd, Apple released Mavericks for free. As well as the iLife ’13 & iWork ’13 suites being announced as free for all newly purchased Macs that shipped with Mavericks.

This came as a shock, but a good one. Next thing was figuring out the licensing.

Below is how we overcame this shock.

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Git-ting with the program

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I’m finally Git-ting with the program & have created a GitHub repo: https://github.com/macmule

For a long time i’ve been unhappy with WordPress’s code handling, & as i can’t be bothered to find a new theme that may work better, i’ve decided to re-post all my longish scripts onto the Hub.

The added bonus being that if any of you learned readers find an issue, or wish to submit an update you can!

Now Git to it!