Friday, November 15, 2024

macos – Username confusion, MacBook Pro, 14.5

I’ve got an M1 MacBook Pro running 14.5. Yesterday, my machine started acting weird, giving me a lot of “Out of application memory” popups. Out of irritation (I didn’t have anything heavyweight running, though it’s only a 16gb machine) I decided to restart.

When it rebooted, I could not log in. I was definitely using the correct password (as later became clear). The main thing that was weird is that my username as far as MacOS is concerned is “m5”, but at the login screen after reboot all that would work, after some time fooling with things, was my full name “first last”. With that, and the same password I had been using, I was able to log in.

Now, however, I am logged in, but when I want to do something like mess with a system setting and it prompts for my password, it does so with “m5” in the disabled username text input, and at this point my password does not work and I’m instructed to wait 414 minutes (or something) and try again.

Now, this is my work laptop and it’s wired into some kind of thing that hooks it into Active Directory or some similar SSO thing on my corporate network. When I log in to Outlook, for example, I use the same password. And when the Microsoft stuff wants me to update my password periodically, I do that by changing my local MacOS password through the normal MacOS system tool, and that magically propagates around. So that may of course have something to do with things.

I don’t know what drives that timed retry thing; is there a way to reset that? I don’t have any other account that can do local admin things (mine normally can, but that’s why this is a weird situation).

edit — I was able to log in with my proper username (for who knows what reason; it did not work the other day). However, though I did that (twice to make sure I’m not crazy), I still get that error from the “sudo” popup, the one about waiting a few hours.

edit again — to be clear about this question, I want to be able to perform local MacOS system settings updates. To do that, the system insists that I enter my own password, and it does so in a standard system dialog. Currently, though I logged in with username “m5”, when I attempt a system update via that “sudo”-like dialog, it fails even though I am using the same password as I used to log in.

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