The Omni Group
These forums are now read-only. Please visit our new forums to participate in discussion. A new account will be required to post in the new forums. For more info on the switch, see this post. Thank you!

Go Back   The Omni Group Forums > OmniFocus > OmniFocus Syncing
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

 
Sync kills WiFi connection [A: WiFi + Bluetooth causing radio interference] Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Support ninjas have suggested the problem is due to my Airport network setup. That is, with the standard Apple Airport base station set-up. Helpful.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by calumma View Post
Support ninjas have suggested the problem is due to my Airport network setup. That is, with the standard Apple Airport base station set-up. Helpful.
What, you don't think it is possible for Apple's base station software to have bugs? I used to routinely crash my older Apple base stations with certain types of traffic, and I'm not talking about injecting hand-crafted "packets of death" either, just ordinary traffic from programs any user could run, without admin privileges. OmniFocus uses Apple frameworks to do its WebDAV transfers, I'm confident. If legitimate data presented to the Apple networking code causes WDS to hiccup, it may not be practical for Omni to work around the problem.

Now you've got me curious enough to try reconfiguring part of my network with WDS instead of an Ethernet backbone....
 
Sorry for your frustrating networking experience! Perhaps I can elaborate on what the support ninjas concluded?

First, let's review the problem you've described:

Quote:
Originally Posted by calumma View Post
I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme. What's interesting is that the wireless signal drops on my iMac at the same time as the iPhone, suggesting the Airport Extreme is struggling with the connection and dropping the link? The iMac immediately reconnects, the iPhone only reconnects if I manually select my wireless network in Settings. The iPhone will also automatically reconnect if I exit OmniFocus and use any other network application (such as mobile Safari).



Following advice elsewhere on the forum, I tried putting the iPhone into airplane mode and then manually turning my wireless network link back on. This resulted in syncing working perfectly (and very fast). Once I turn airplane mode off and try to sync, bam! The wireless connection is killed (on both the iPhone and iMac). 100% repeatable. OmniFocus is the only app on my iPhone that causes this behaviour.



Not sure if it is particularly unusual, but the logs simply report that the remote base station has disassociated with the main base station and then disconnected from network. The logs then indicate CCMP key is installed, the TKIP group key is rotated and the remote base station is associated once again with the main base station.



Support ninjas have suggested the problem is due to my Airport network setup. That is, with the standard Apple Airport base station set-up. Helpful.
Now, a little background on wireless networking and OmniFocus:
I'm running with the same basic configuration that you are (two Apple base stations, one remote and one local) and I've never seen this problem. But I did see plenty of general networking problems when I was setting up the wireless network—eventually I got everything positioned just right so that those problems went away.

Bonjour syncing in OmniFocus itself uses a few simple standard operations: first it figures out where your Mac server is on the network using Bonjour (resolving a service name to an IP address). It then connects to your Mac's WebDAV server (an apache server which comes built into the operating system) and uses standard networking APIs to make HTTP/WebDAV requests, asking for a list of transaction on the server (PROPFIND), then downloading and uploading any new transactions which aren't on the other side, recording its sync position, and finally removing any synced files that have been seen by every device. None of this should behave any differently with wireless than it does over the wire—assuming, of course, that the wireless network is working properly.

In practice, wireless networks are more fragile than wired networks: signals from wireless devices can interfere with each other, so even if things seem to work right when you're using a single device they might stop behaving once several devices are involved. Since you've said your remote base station is losing its connection to the main base station, it sounds like it's having trouble maintaining that connection when all four devices (iMac, iPhone, and two base stations) are actively transmitting. (If you're transmitting small enough chunks you might get lucky and the transmissions might not overlap, or be able to retry without overlapping.)

When your base station resets, it might be handing out new IP addresses to your devices, which would confuse any OmniFocus sync sessions in progress since they've already finished their Bonjour service-name-to-ip-address handshake phase.
So, what to do? I can think of two ways to try to solve this:
One way would be to try to reconfigure your wireless network to something a little more robust, perhaps moving the base stations closer together or adding a repeating base station somewhere between the two. Or, ideally, replace one of the wireless links with a wire (say, between the iMac and the nearby base station) so that there's less radio traffic to cause interference. Making your wireless network more robust seems like a good idea in general, but depending on your physical layout it might be difficult to solve. Especially if the only app affected is OmniFocus.

The other approach would be to change your OmniFocus configuration so that it doesn't require all four devices to be transmitting at once. The easiest way to do this would be to switch to a sync server in the cloud, such as our Omni Sync Server. Even if your wireless network continues to have intermittent problems in this setup, OmniFocus syncing should still end up being a little more robust because it wouldn't be relying on a potentially-out-of-date Bonjour hostname lookup.
I hope this helps!

Last edited by Ken Case; 2010-08-25 at 08:27 AM.. Reason: Added indentation to make the text more scannable
 
I have seen this for ages - way over a year - relatively consistantly and with 2 different iPhones and different MacBooks...

I have Bonjour based sync working fairly well.

However fairly often, I start up OmniFocus on the iPhone, and either just let it sync or force a sync, and you can see the WiFi icon on the top of the display wink out and be replaced with a mobile network connection (normally GPRS at this particular location).

Sometimes you can regain wifi by going to the prefs app and selecting the wifi network, often it appears that you have to kill OmniFocus off (at least in iOS 4), get wifi and then restart OmniFocus to get a successful sync attempt.

It really feels as though there is a correlation with OmniFocus and getting knocked off the network. Even more so there feels like a correlation between a second or subsequent sync session (ie after a weekend I tend to have changes on the phone, so I sync them back, do my weekly review etc, and then sync again) and this form of sync failure....

Other than this I have no problems with WiFi usage or with sync...

Oddly I tried using MobileMe sync for a while due to this, and I seem to get the same effect of knocking the phone off the WiFi network, but the sync still succeeds if somewhat slowly...

Sounds wacky, has anyone else seen this?

Nigel.
 
That sounds a little like the problem described in calumma's Sync Issues thread, which seemed to be caused by an unreliable Wi-Fi network being overloaded by too much local traffic. I guess I'd start by checking your Wi-Fi router's logs to see if it has any additional information, or perhaps your iPhone's console logs (which you can access using Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility).
 
My wifi network is perfectly reliable thank you. The only software that I experience issues with is OmniFocus on the iPhone. I can move GB of data between different macs on my network without problem, yet a simple ToDo app on my phone causes the network to fail. As others have also reported, turning on Airplane mode on the phone and manually reconnecting wifi, enables sync to function.

nigelm go into settings and turn on airplane mode. Then manually reconnect to your wifi network, reopen OmniFocus and retry the sync. Let us know if this works.
 
Just tried turning on web sharing on the mac with desktop version of OmniFocus and my Bonjour syncing problems went away. No need to turn on airplane mode and manually reconnect my wifi network. Note that I do NOT have a firewall set up on this machine (I have hardware firewall on my modem).

EDIT: don't yet know if this is a long-term solution, but it may be worth others giving it a try.

Last edited by calumma; 2010-09-10 at 07:57 AM..
 
I appreciate the advice but I remain unconvinced. What I don't understand is if my airport connection is unreliable, why does the sync succeed when the phone is placed in airport mode and wifi is then manually reselected. If the wifi was being overloaded, presumably it would be overloaded whether or not the phone was placed in airplane mode? Surely the wifi network would be more likely to become overloaded if I force the phone to keep its wifi connection after turning on airplane mode?

Also, this problem occurs no matter how much or little information I am attempting to sync. Are you honestly saying that syncing just one item can overload a users wifi network? Note that I can copy large files and control other macs on the same network using Finders built in VNC client (that presumably push much more data back and forth), as well as macs at remote locations.
 
Bonjour syncing still working better than before, but dropped wifi connection does occur every now and again. Restarting OmniFocus on the Mac seems to fix this now though. Something about my setup has obviously changed. The only two significant differences I am aware of are the upgrade of iPhone to iOS 4.1 and enabling of web sharing on the mac.

EDIT: Had some time to play around with OmniFocus this morning so tried turning web sharing on and off, adding items to OmniFocus and syncing with iPhone. As far as I can tell, enabling/disabling web sharing is having no effect at all. I can only assume the upgrade to iOS 4.1 has fixed 'something' that makes bonjour syncing more reliable.

EDIT2: I spoke too soon. When I disable web sharing the first sync completes successfully, but repeat syncs fail with the message 'specified sync server could not be found'. Enabling web sharing on the mac and restarting OmniFocus on iPhone results in bonjour syncing working on successive occasions.

Last edited by calumma; 2010-09-13 at 12:05 AM..
 
Hi!

I discovered the same problem with the iphone dropping the wlan connection when syncing.

As im using a iPhone 4 (4.1) and a Cisco 581W Router.

So I don't think it's either a iPhone 3G problem nor a Airport problem.

Just my thoughts...


Mark.
 
 


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Please give an option to sync over WIFI only kevinx Syncing via Omni Sync Server 4 2012-08-17 04:06 PM
Is Quick WiFi Sync Possible? Stargazer OmniFocus Syncing 3 2011-08-16 09:44 PM
WiFi Sync for iPhone via Omni? shaawasmund OmniFocus for iPhone 7 2011-05-07 10:04 AM
Bonjour sync: Same wifi or same local network? jmoriana Bonjour sync 1 2009-03-10 01:20 PM
Feature Request: WiFi sync redfood OmniFocus for iPhone 1 2008-07-17 04:39 PM


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 03:41 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.