Working from home doesn’t mean I’m always working from home. Sometimes I am out and about with my laptop. However, I’m also a person who just prefers to use to use a desktop whenever possible. I find the process of disconnecting or reconnecting all the external devices I use tedious so I avoid it as much as possible. This is why my main system is a personal Mac mini from late 2018 and my portable system is a company-provided MacBook Pro from 2015. Since the mini is my primary system, most of what I’m working with is located on that system and I will either ssh into the mini from the portable to run some commands or use SMB to mount the files (over a VPN of course) so I can edit them using VS Code.

One tool I make heavy use of is aws-vault. This tool, which I’ve written about previously, allows you to put your AWS credentials into macOS’s keychain system. Using macOS’s keychain keeps the information off of the file system as plain text and allows me to sync the data between Macs (and iPhone). When sitting at a Mac your keychain will be unlocked when you enter your password. However, when accessing a Mac remotely using ssh the keychain will remain locked which makes using aws-vault and some other tools a bit more difficult to use. Luckily, there is a way to unlock the keychain so you can use it properly.

Once you have a remote shell into your Mac you can issue security list to view the keychains that can be unlocked. In my case, I want to unlock the aws-vault keychain. To do so I issue security unlock /Users/dustin/Library/Keychains/aws-vault.keychain-db. After pressing enter you are asked for your system password. Enter this, press enter again and the keychain will be unlocked. To unlock your default keychain simply issue security unlock.

With your keychain unlocked tools that depend on keychain will begin to work properly.