[missing-sync-palmos-talk] MS 4.0: Problems with WLAN and USB syncing; BT syncing not working at all

[Pekka Nikander]

I purchased and installed MS 4.0 yesterday, and I have
serious problems with WLAN and USB, BT syncing working
not at all.  (I also had the initial registration and
plist problem, but that was fixed as M/S fixed their
backend server...)

First, there seems to be some glitch in the Missing Sync
Monitor that sometimes makes it completely unresponsive.
None of the syncing options works.  I am not sure what
reset this, but starting and quitting the GUI app, Missing
Sync for Palm OS, seems to fix this.  I've also at least
twice got an Conduit Manager crash; I can send the core
dump if anyone is interested.  (I think that both times
I initially didn't have the GUI app running when this
happened, but I may be wrong.)

Secondly, I seem to get non-deterministic results on syncing
working wrt. the GUI app running.  This is more gut feeling
that a result of proper testing, but I have the feeling
that sometimes syncing works when the GUI app is running (but
not when it is not), and sometimes vice versa.  It may be
related to whether I use WLAN or USB.  Alternatively, this
may just be a symptom of the problem above, the Monitor going
into an unresponsive mode.

WLAN and BT are definitely more problematic than USB,
even though I do have had problems with USB syncing as well.
(See the first problem above).

In the beginning, I didn't have any success whatsoever with
neither WLAN or BT syncing, even though I very carefully
followed the steps in the manual and help.

In the WLAN case, it turned out that the Mac OS X firewall
was part of the problem.  You have to manually open TCP port
14238 for the WLAN syncing to work.  To do that, go to
System Preferences->Sharing, Firewall tab.  Click New...
Set Port name to Other, Port NUmber to 14238, and description
to e.g. Palm LAN HotSync.

After that, and after having had my Mac sleeping overnight,
I was able to perform WLAN hotsync for a number of times
(three or four), but after that it stopped working again.
The TCP connection is created (I can verify this with tcpdump
and netstat -an) but syncing doesn't start.  With netstat -an
there seems to be some stale TCP connections.  Perhaps the
Monitor doesn't properly realise that the Palm has closed
the TCP connection, and gets confused?

In the BT case, so far I've had no success.  When I try to
initiate BT sync from the Palm, the BT Icon on the Menu
bar does show BT connection, but synching doesn't start at
all.  With BT Serial Utility I've verified that there still
is the Bluetooth-PDA-Sync port just like there was before.
With Missing Sync for Sony Clie BT sync worked just fine.

--Pekka Nikander