[workaround] WiFi Sync issues — a campfire story

ManicDee
ManicDee
Community Member
in Mac

It had been some time since my last WiFi sync. I've been trying to establish a morning ritual of syncing passwords, but sometimes I'm in a rush, and then skipping some steps one day turns into skipped steps on two days, then it's three weeks and my password vaults are out of sync. So this morning I thought I'd do the right thing and get everything up to date (especially since my work passwords have changed, and I needed to keep those up to date).

I opened 1Password on my Mac (Yosemite 10.10.2, 1Password 5.1 (510035) Agile Web Store version), then opened 1Password (5.2.1) on my iPhone 6 (iOS 8.2 12D508), everything behaved as expected. The sync happened and I breathed a sigh of relief.

But then I opened 1Password (5.2.1) on my iPad Mini 3 (also running iOS 8.2 12D508), and there was no WiFi sync server to be found! I power cycled the iPad and the iMac: still no WiFi sync.

Checking the Sharing settings, I found that the iMac had given itself a name "Real Name (8)" instead of "Real Name" (names have been changed to protect the guilty). "hostname" on the command line returned the expected "realname".

So I changed the name in Sharing to just "Real Name", power cycled the iMac, launched 1Password, and my WiFi sync was again accessible to the iPad.

My suspicions at present are that "Real Name (8)" in the Sharing window was a side effect of having Ethernet and WiFi active on the iMac (because location aware apps won't work without WiFi turned on). I've turned WiFi off on the iMac, and we'll see if the problem reappears at a later date.

Comments

  • Stephen_C
    Stephen_C
    Community Member

    Sorry that you've been through that. There have been many reports on this forum and on the 1P for iOS forum of Yosemite apparently randomly changing a device name—to the substantial detriment of wifi sync, as you've discovered. I'm not sure whether anyone has yet traced the exact cause so am sure your comments will be of interest to AgileBits.

    Stephen

  • Drew_AG
    Drew_AG
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @ManicDee,

    Thank you so much for sharing those details here! I'm sure that will be helpful for others who have the same problem.

    As Stephen mentioned, this is something others have reported. The problem is that Yosemite has a bad habit of renaming the Mac (as you discovered). That can cause a problem for Bonjour which is what 1Password uses for Wi-Fi sync. (Incidentally, this can apparently also cause a problem with iTunes sync over Wi-Fi). We can't control this behavior of Yosemite, but at least you'll know what to look for if the problem happens again in the future.

    If you need anything else, please let us know - we're always glad to help!

This discussion has been closed.