[missing-sync-pocketpc-talk] Problems with bluetooth and a possible fix(?).

[Sammy Banawan]

Hi, list.

First, let me apologize if I'm out of line by suggesting this fix. Read 
at your own risk.

Here's the situation: I've been having intermittent problems connecting 
via bluetooth. If I restart my computer, all these problems go away for 
at least one connection. Something I notice is that the bluetooth 
menubar item does not change when I'm having difficulty, indicating to 
me that there is no connection between my iPaq and my powerbook (quite 
obviously). There is also nothing in the MS log, even under verbose 
mode. Turning off bluetooth and turning back on doesn't fix it. Soft 
reseting my ppc doesn't do it either. Since I'm not fond of restarting 
and that seems to be the only reliable way to get it working again, I 
decided to open up the terminal and kick the bluetooth daemon myself.

Could others try this out and see if it works (only if you're 
comfortable in the terminal)?
1. fire up terminal.app
2. ps -ax | grep "blued" [enter] [look at the lines printed. there 
should be two. The first one is what we're after]
3. sudo kill -HUP [and the process number of the first line]. That 
would be the 3 digit number printed out on the first line, followed by 
??
4. You'll be prompted for you administrator password. Enter it.

Here's an example:
______________________
Welcome to Darwin!
[minnie:~] torifile% ps -ax | grep "blue"
   118  ??  S      0:01.80 /usr/sbin/blued
   763 std  S+     0:00.00 grep blue
[minnie:~] torifile% sudo kill -HUP 118
Password:
[minnie:~] torifile%
_______________________

You'll receive no notification that anything has happened at all. To 
verify, you can run the "ps -ax | grep "blue"" command again. If the 
process number is different, bluetooth daemon has restarted.

Then try to connect via bluetooth again. What this does is that it gets 
the process number of the bluetooth daemon and then you gently kick it 
back into life (kill -HUP tells the system to kill that process 
gracefully and blued starts on its own again). This is slightly 
annoying to have to do, but hopefully it'll work reliably. My one 
concern is that this problem is isolated to connections between my ppc 
and my computer. I can communicate with my bt phone with both devices 
even when they refuse to talk to one another...

My suspicion is that something is not closing the connection between 
the ppc and the mac. Restarting the daemon fixes it temporarily. I 
don't know if it's a MS problem or a ppc problem, but, given the 
sketchy history of syncing on the ppc platform even in Windows, it's 
probably the ppc screwing it up. Further evidence of this is that 
PocketMac v.3 also has this problem. I haven't tried this fix with PM 
yet because I'm using MS right now but I may try it in the future.

My system stats:

OS X 10.2.6
Powerbook 12" 867mhz G4
640 megs of ram
MS 1.0.2b3 (v16)
iPaq 2215
connecting via bluetooth