[bonniescotland]

Hi All
I've googled and looked through this forum and haven't seen anyone else with this issue. My family bought 2 macbook pros, 1 for myself and 1 for a relative. On both when we click on Finder instead of the actual User Name being in the sidebar there it shows the password!

Under the system preferences the user name is correct and when we login it's also correct, but it's the sidebar of the finder that shows the actual password, whereas on previous computers that always showed the user name. This to me is a real security breach, considering both computers have the same issue I can't be the only one? I don't even want to take it back to apple it to as they will see our passwords although I guess they probably can easily hack it anyway. I actually tried to fix one of the computers and botched it up, but I think I'll put that on a separate thread. This first computer I haven't touched so any ideas how to fix it?

[Spheric Harlot]

When you first set up the machine, the initial user was called what is now the password.

The initial user name determines two things: The full name of the user (duh), and the name of the home folder (what you see in the Finder sidebar), also called the "short user name", which is a shortened form of the initial user name.

You can change the real user name, but that does NOT change the short user name or rename the home folder (which is a fairly complex task for various technical reasons).

This CAN be done on 10.6 and earlier (and there's a handy utility that does it for 10.5 and earlier), but there's no documentation on how to change this for Lion, yet.

[bonniescotland]

Thank you for the explanation. I don't understand though why Apple would choose to make someone's password their user name, fortunately both of us used passwords that we don't use for anything else, but imagine if we had used the same password that we use for our bank accounts etc. I think most people would assume that a password is a confidential thing and not something to be used as a user name.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by bonniescotland 

Thank you for the explanation. I don't understand though why Apple would choose to make someone's password their user name

They don't, and they never have.

When you first set up the machine, the first field is "User Name" and the second field is "short user name", followed by TWO fields for the password and its repetition, respectively.

What likely happened was that you (or whoever else) typed the user name, then hit tab, typed the password, then clicked "continue", only to find that you/they need to enter the password AGAIN, TWICE, which is then done under annoyed cussing, before continuing on to the next step.

Does that sound plausible to you?

[bonniescotland]

Oh I misunderstood your first post. So basically you are saying it could be we made a mistake by thinking the password field was the user name field, well I guess that's possible but I'm pretty sure we didn't do that, would be unusual for both of us to make the same mistake and also personally when I type that kind of stuff in I tend to be very careful about it because I know how difficult it can be to change later, but yes I guess it's possible it was our human error, but I don't think it was. Anyway actually since my last post I've actually figured out a way to fix it, will post in a moment.

[bonniescotland]

Okay I fixed it, have changed the username by doing the following. Let's pretend my original username and password were Scarlett and I wanted to change the Username to Tara so I did the following:

System Preferences - Users & Groups - changed Full Name to Tara

then
System Preferences - Users & Groups - Login Items - Join - Open Directory Utility - Directory Editor - clicked on Scarlett - Edit - Enable Root User
Then I changed everything in the list that said Scarlett to Tara, except for the one that said password I kept that as Scarlett. Saved it all, then Edit - Disable Root User.

I have now changed the Username!

Oh and you may not notice the changes till you restart or log back in.

WARNING: Doing this means you will probably lose your files and maybe some settings, so backup everything before you do this, however it didn't seem to affect the installed applications, but I did lose some files and settings and also downloaded applications. This was fine as I had everything backed up, but just be careful.

WARNING 2: Having said all this I'm no IT expert so anyone else who reads this, approach my instructions with caution in case I've done something that will cause problems for me later, but so far it all seems to be working perfectly.