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Note: this applies to Leopard (10.5), not Snow Leopard (10.6); SL apparently has its own serious guest account problems. (Thanks, Harlan)
Today, a friend wanted to use my laptop at a meeting. I thought, cool, good thing Mac OS X has a "guest account" mechanism where a friend can log into a guest account and when they log out, it will be completely cleaned from my system.
However, when I clicked "Allow guests to log into this computer", something went wrong and the Mac "spinning beach ball" spun indefinitely. Damn.
It turns out that something in the backend expects a guest
account to already exist in some form. Because it's not there, something critical crashes ("user account migration somehow confuses the 'guest user' machinery, which totally trashes securityd
which dies of sudden death and from then on nothing works on the computer." via izidor).
Solving this problem is straight-forward but a bit of a pain in the ass.
- First, print this out or bookmark this page so you can come back to it.
- Force-quite system preferences and then you'll have to hold down the power key on your computer until it shuts down (feel free to try a restart, it won't work... it gets stuck in some sort of loop).
- Restart.
- Log in as an administrator.
- Your system guest account must be disabled (it already is if you have the described symptoms above).
- In the Accounts pane of System Preferences, Create new standard account with name
guest
and short nameguest
. Important: the short name must beguest
---Mac OS will suggest the short nameguest1
, but you must edit that intoguest
. - Enable the system guest account in System Preferences (check the "Allow guests to log into this computer" switch). It will work now that
guest
name is taken. This action will create user account with short nameguest1
with all the properties of guest (clean-up after logout etc.). - Completely delete standard user
guest
, which you created in step 6 (check "delete home folder" to get rid of it all). - Disable the system guest account (uncheck the switch).
- Right-click on system guest account icon and choose "Advanced" or whatever (there is only one menu item anyway) and change short name from
guest1
toguest
. - Enable system guest account.
- Log into the guest account.
- Log off as guest and log in with an admin account.
- Disable guest account in System Preferences.
- Go back to System Preferences, open the advanced settings of Guest Account and now you can safely rename the path of the home dir from
/Users/Guest1
to/Users/Guest
. - Now re-enable guest account.
- The next time, you log in as guest, a new guest dir will be created with the correct name
Guest
.
otherwise
I have the same problem above, but slightly different, first i can't click on the allow guests to log on this computer. I can only click on allow guests to connect on shared folder.
I tried to create another standard account like you mentioned on point number 6, but it says "guest" is already used and it doest suggest anything, after i changed to guest1, it required to create a new password.. so i changed the create account into group, but i do not think it is the same thing.. i am not sure if i could explain myself.. please help