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Fix Multipass Client not Authenticated

Describe the bug for MACOS

When trying to use multipass in any way on my MAC, for example:

multipass list

I get the following output:

list failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipass service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before proceeding.

Then trying

multipass authenticate

results in:

Please enter passphrase:
authenticate failed: Passphrase is not set. Please 'multipass set local.passphrase' with a trusted client.

multipass set local.passphrase

results in

Please enter passphrase:
Please re-enter passphrase:
set failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipasss service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before  proceeding.

Solution for macOS

I resolved this issue on macOS by following these steps:

  • Open the terminal and switch to the root user with: bash sudo -i
  • Manually remove the Multipass folders from /var/root/Application Support/ using (There were 2 in my case): bash cd /var/root/Library/Application\ Support rm -rf multipass*

  • Manually remove the multipass from /usr/local/caskroom/ using : sh cd /usr/local/caskroom rm -rf multipass

  • Uninstall Multipass with Homebrew using the --zap option, which removes all related files: bash brew --zap uninstall multipass

  • Reinstall Multipass with Homebrew: bash brew install --cask multipass

After following these steps, everything works as expected.