Error when trying to change to login keychain

[HiRez]

Hi,

first of all I don't know if this post fits in here, but I could'nt find any board specifically dedicated to support questions. So here I go:

I'm currently evaluating Espionage. I'd like to change the password storage from the Espionage keychain to the regular login keychain, but that doesn't seem to work. I click the "Go" button in the preferences and all I get is this error message:

»Error
Can't get password for: 'xyz'«

xyz being one of my encrypted "folders". I already tried to remove this specific folder but then I get the exact same error message on the next encrypted folder. I also tried locking, unlocking and disabling my folders prior to this. Doesn't make any difference.

Any ideas what's wrong here and how I can change to the login keychain?

[greg]

Have you tried logging out and logging back in and trying it again?

[HiRez]

Yes, I tried that – rebooting too. Still the same error message.  :|

[greg]

That's odd, can you unlock a folder by unchecking the "Locked" checkbox in Espionage?  I suspect that if this is the case then you shouldn't be able to do that.

Since we haven't received any reports of this before I don't think this is a widespread bug (and we're unable to reproduce it here), but it would help us see what's going wrong if you could send the relevant information from the system log that's output when you attempt to switch to the login keychain. The system log is accessible from the Espionage Help menu, and a video that shows how to use it is available here. Please send the log to our support email address (don't post it to this forum).

You can get around the problem by doing this:

• Disable all of the folders that you have in Espionage by unchecking the Enabled checkbox (and don't forget to press "Save Changes")
• After all folders are disabled, move all of them to some temporary location that's different from their current location.
• In Espionage, remove all of the folders from Espionage by pressing the minus button (or pressing the backspace key).
• Espionage will attempt to restore the folders, but since they have been moved it will just complain about not being able to find them
• Switch to using the login keychain. Now there are no passwords to migrate so it should work.
• Move all of the folders back to their original locations.
• Re-add each folder to Espionage using the same password and encryption settings that you used for the folder previously. Espionage will quickly re-add them without re-encrypting them.

Sorry about this problem, the keychain can be odd sometimes and we're actually planning on moving away from it.

- Greg

[HiRez]

Thanks,

this workaround did the trick.

[HiRez]

Oh well, it does not really work as it turns out now.

Espionage(Helper) now hangs and freezes a lot of applications almost every time I start it. This is what happens:

I invoke Quicksilver, I try to start Espionage. It comes up saying: "waiting for EspionageHelper". A few moments later the black password prompt comes up, but before I can type my master password another window appears: Quicksilver wants permission to access one of my Espionage folders (which are are all unlocked already, btw). After that I cant type anything into either of the windows, Quicksilver freezes, Spotlight freezes. I have to start the activity monitor via the Finder (which still responds fortunately) and kill both the Espionage and the EspionageHelper process to make my system work again.

To be honest, I'm not too thrilled so far by my experiences testing Espionage. :-(

Here are the relevant lines from my system.log:

Apr 15 11:02:51 Macintosh /usr/sbin/spindump[1214]: process 302 is being monitored
Apr 15 11:02:51 Macintosh diskarbitrationd[45]: Quicksilver [302]:45827 not responding.
Apr 15 11:03:14 Macintosh EspionageHelper[1209]: INFO: Posted alert message: Denying access
Apr 15 11:03:14 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: 2009-04-15 11:03:14.753 EspionageHelper[1209:4203] INFO: Posted alert message: Denying access
Apr 15 11:03:14 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: [iSpy.framework] ERROR: send: Bad file descriptor
Apr 15 11:03:14 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: [Messages] WARNING: sendMessage: error sending data
Apr 15 11:03:14 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: [iSpy.framework] ERROR: error sending message to ispyd
Apr 15 11:03:15 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: "disk3" unmounted.
Apr 15 11:03:15 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: "disk3" ejected.
Apr 15 11:03:15 Macintosh EspionageHelper[1209]: WARN (dmgDetach:264): couldn't unmount using cocoa, trying lower
Apr 15 11:03:15 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: 2009-04-15 11:03:15.915 EspionageHelper[1209:10b] WARN (dmgDetach:264): couldn't unmount using cocoa, trying lower
Apr 15 11:03:17 Macintosh /usr/sbin/spindump[1214]: process 302 is being no longer being monitored
Apr 15 11:03:19 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: "disk4" unmounted.
Apr 15 11:03:19 Macintosh [0x0-0xa00a0].com.taoeffect.Espionage[1206]: "disk4" ejected.

[greg]

I'm sorry to hear about the continuing problems. We wouldn't be too thrilled either if Espionage caused such behavior, but thankfully this seems like a special case. We're going to write a simple diagnostic application that will gather various log files and other information (such as settings, file paths, etc) that will help us understand what's going on.

In the meantime, was Espionage ever successfully working for you? Based on that log it looks like you may have already encrypted some folders. Are you encrypting any folders over a network, or perhaps ones in Dropbox?

[greg]

We've quickly thrown together a simple tool called TEDiagnosticTool that gathers many of the files that we would normally ask you to find yourself.  Unfortunately we did not have time to make it very nice and automated (we will improve it at some point though).  For now, just run it, go through the steps, leave the checkboxes selected. It will then quit and open a Finder window with a folder named "TEDT-XXXXXX" (where the X's are numbers) selected.  Right-click on this folder, compress it into a zip file, and email it to our support address.  This should give us the information needed to figure out why Espionage is misbehaving on your system.

Edit: The tool has been updated, it's very much automated now. It should gather the information, zip it up, and send it to us without much intervention on your part (if all goes well).