Rclone with OneDrive on MacOS – unauthenticated: Unauthenticated

The rclone mount command worked without throwing any errors, and I could browse all my files from the local directory. However, when loading up my music collection with VLC, I got that little annoying spinning beachball of death. The reason appeared obvious going by rclone’s error log:

2024/12/07 15:22:18 ERROR : 1914 - Eschatology of War/1914 - Eschatology of War - 01 War In.flac: vfs cache: failed to download: vfs reader: failed to write to cache file: unauthenticated: Unauthenticated
2024/12/07 15:22:18 ERROR : 1914 - Eschatology of War/1914 - Eschatology of War - 01 War In.flac: vfs cache: failed to download: vfs reader: failed to write to cache file: unauthenticated: Unauthenticated
2024/12/07 15:22:19 ERROR : 1914 - Eschatology of War/1914 - Eschatology of War - 01 War In.flac: vfs cache: failed to download: vfs reader: failed to write to cache file: unauthenticated: Unauthenticate

unauthenticated: Unauthenticated

I felt confident that something must have gotten wiped or corrupted after upgrading to macOS Sequoia. I concluded that a simple fix would be to delete the misbehaving remote and configure it from scratch.

Authenticating with OneDrive while setting up the remote anew should solve whatever the “unauthenticated” error was referring to. I was none too pleased to discover that my effort had resolved exactly nothing.

Did you try updating that thang?

After searching for an answer to my issue, I came across the following list of OneDrive fixes from the Rclone v1.67.0 changelog:

Onedrive
    Add --onedrive-hard-delete to permanently delete files (Nick Craig-Wood)
    Make server-side copy work in more scenarios (YukiUnHappy)
    Fix "unauthenticated: Unauthenticated" errors when downloading (Nick Craig-Wood)

Interestingly, the latest version of Rclone at the time of writing is Rclone v1.68.2. Issuing rclone version on my Macbook prints out v1.66.0. Why am I running an old version? I was convinced I had installed rclone using brew and should have the latest version.

Alas no, I had installed the Rclone binary from Github as a one-and-done job. Oh well, at least I got intimately familiar with my Little Snitch configuration trying to figure out if the error was related to firewall rules.

An update later and happy tunes were once more filling my earholes.