260326 IPad Issues
HMoG! Trimble has made signing in ridiculously complicated. In fact, I tried 6 or 7 times today, adding more and more security, and still never made it through to using SketchUp. It’s a good thing I wasn’t relying on it for a client. and to be clear, there was never any doubt about my username or password. Massively frustrating.
Is it just me, or is anyone else finding the 5 or 6 means of confirming an account massively over the top. This is not top secret material!
Must be. I setup a Passkey PIN for Trimble.com and sign in is now a breeze.
It uses Windows Hello which is built into Windows 11.
But I think you must also log into your computer using a passkey PIN to activate Windows Hello.
There is plenty of help on the web for this. Or any AI interface can give instructions.
I sign in with my Apple ID on iPad. Then I don’t need to use any of Trimble’s verification system. It scans my face/fingerprint and off I go.
Or you can use a passkey with the trimble system on IOS
1 button press, it Can’t get much easier than that can it?
Not just you.
I setup a passkey on my windows machine which made it super easy, until I tried to login on my Mac. Now, despite having valid login & password credentials and an already setup authenticator, it asks only for a passkey, which I don’t yet have on the Mac, or to scan a QR code which does nothing except say it’s incompatible. It also offers ‘another way’ which isn’t another way - back to the same passkey/qr code method.
I finally had to go back to the pc and turn on 2FA for my authenticator app while installing a second Trimble authenticator, so that I could then log in on the PC using that… and finally gain access on the Mac again.
Clearly we’re not expected to login on a second machine at any point.
If you’ve used Windows Hello as your passkey provider, the passkey is stored on that device and cannot be transferred to another device - that’s just how Windows Hello is currently.
Because of this, you may need to create a passkey on each device you want to sign in from. For example, you can create one on your Windows PC and another on your Mac, and either can then be used to sign in.
Another option is to store a passkey on a device such as your phone. When signing in on another computer, your phone (which holds the passkey) this can then be used to approve the login.
As for authentication apps - they all do the same thing, so you only need one.
I primarily use Windows, occasionally use a Mac, and am an iPhone user. I’ve removed all third-party authenticator apps and now rely solely on the iPhone’s built-in Passwords app to store my pass keys and generate any MFA codes I need.
This keeps all my passwords and authentication credentials tied to my Apple ID and iPhone. As a result, I can access the same passwords and verification codes seamlessly on both my Windows PC and Mac.
By centralizing everything through Apple’s ecosystem, managing logins and passkeys across devices becomes a bit easier to manage.
This is all valid info, the trouble was that I couldn’t login on the mac in order to make another passkey there. I had to disable passkeys on the windows side, in order to gain access to my account on the mac.
In the midst of that there is only a button to create an authenticator login, not to use one that was valid before I setup the windows-side passkey. So I created a second one (and deleted the now unusable first one).
Once logged in on both your advice is good though.
One of things new users to passkeys need to get their head around, is that the PIN that they enter is only an index into the passkey database for a website on the local machine. When you set up a passkey, it is generated and stored on that machine only. It is not transportable unless you have a FIDO key thumbstick.
This means that you need to setup and generate a passkey for each website you need to log into on each machine you will use.
We never actually see the generated passkey data, they are transparent like security certificates. The system is similar to the old PGP encryption scheme. Since the passkey is machine dependent and linked to a URL, the PIN is not that important. I use the same PIN on my notebook for all of the website passkeys I’ve generated. A PIN is not like a password. So you can use the same PIN for the same website on different computers. The PIN is not sent to the website, it is only used to select the local passkey to send to the website.
But YES, this also means that if you have multiple machines, you also need to go to the website and and register a passkey for each machine.
And also, you can have multiple MFA types enabled. So early on a user should keep the password or Authenticator Code type of 2FA enabled so they can log in on all machines to setup passkeys.
I use LastPass, which stores passkeys in its cloud.