Guest account: no further login after NoMAD Login (macOS Ventura)

After using the NoMAD Login guest login once, the guest user could not log in again. The profile was deleted, but the account was not – and the newly generated password no longer matched.

Check the user records

dscl . readall /users

This lists all local users and their attributes. Look for entries like these:

<key>failedLoginCount</key>
<integer>3</integer>
<key>failedLoginTimestamp</key>
<real>1674821742.893362</real>

The user failed to log in three times; the timestamp shows the last failure.

Error message

authorizationhost: [com.apple.Authorization:AuthorizationHost] Failed to authenticate user <<private>> (error: 9).

Watch the log stream

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.Authorization"' --debug

This shows all authorization events, including those from NoMAD Login – look for errors and warnings.

Solution

We moved away from the guest account. 😐

Originally published on anyresearch.net. These are notes from real-world admin work – test before you use them in production.