Keychain?

[paulc]

In another thread, I got to thinking more about the Keychain. Now that I'm a confirmed Keychain user, my wish is to keep a load of passwords in there. So from day one I selected the option in Yummy to "store passwords in keychain."

However, I was having an issue and was asked to check that my username/password for connecting to a protected ftp site were correct. It seems that both items were a part of the Yummy bookmark, but was NOT listed in my keychain.

So with the option selected in Yummy, will it keep username/password in both the bookmark AND the keychain? And if it's missing from the keychain (as it seems to be for me) it seems totally obscured in Yummy to the point where I can't see it in there.

[JD]

If Yummy has stored a password in your Keychain, it will not also be present in the Bookmark. The only way you could end up with the 'store passwords in Keychain' option enabled AND have a Bookmark with a password stored in it is if the Bookmark was saved while the 'store passwords in Keychain' option was not enabled. For what it's worth, the setting was only recently set to be enabled by default, so in previous versions Yummy would always store the password in the Bookmark itself, unless the user manually enabled the option.

If you edit and then save your Bookmark while the 'store passwords in Keychain' option is enabled, any password in the Bookmark will be removed and placed into the Keychain.

Does this sound like your scenario?

[paulc]

Unfortunately at this point I only have one ftp site with a userid/password to fool with. Pretty sure I've always had the "store in keychain" enabled, so I followed your advice (well, I deleted the userename/password in the bookmark). Deleting them in the bookmark DID transfer the information into my keychain...

I had to fool around a bit to find out it's ONLY the password and not the userid (browsers pull both from the keychain absent a cookie); more explanation might be appropriate but it looks like the wiki is not open to third parties. A tad of explanation might be appropriate in the online help.

[JD]

As discussed/discovered in another thread, there is an issue where entering the same password as already present in the Keychain would not remove the password from the Bookmark/FTP Alias. I guess this confused the whole issue a bit. In any case, as you discovered, if you simply remove the password then the one in the Keychain is used.

I'm not sure whether it needs to be explicitly explained that only passwords are stored in the Keychain. It's been this way ever since the Keychain was introduced back in the Mac OS 7 (?) timeframe. Now I'm showing my age.... 

[paulc]

OS 7? How about one, tiny 400k floppy? Before they dared to breathe MEGABYTE, before there even WAS such a thing as a giga of anything! When RAM was measured in k, not m, and g was only whispered on Star Trek.

Seriously, my guess is 98% of Mac users know of Keychain holding user names and passwords from web experiences. I had to see how it worked before I realized Yummy only used the password.

[JD]

Well, ok I admit I did start my Mac life in System 6    ... and I have to admit to being quite a Trekkie myself 

To clarify, the server IP/name, TCP port number, protocol, username and initial path can all be used in conjunction as an identifier in the Keychain that points to a particular password. So actually, the username is stored in the Keychain as an identifier, but only the password is retrieved from the Keychain by Yummy. As far as I know, other FTP clients behave the same way.

[paulc]

Ahhhh, I've seen a few of the newly remastered Trek eps on my HD TV, they look mahvelous, simply mahvelous!

Boy, you missed some really interesting days... a 400K floppy with the OS AND an app (MacWrite) that can store about 3 or 4 small documents! One splurged on the external 400k floppy drive for more serious document storage.