Syncing - General Notes and Troubleshooting Tips

Like many DTTG users, I was at odds with the desktop/iOS syncing for awhile. The behavior shown by the syncing modules isn’t consistent, but I’ve figured out multiple methods for determining why it doesn’t work.

My scenario is a corporate environment with an 802.1X authenticated wifi network that our devices attach to through AD authentication. Normally with my home wifi network or a single node I have zero issues. However when I step into my corporate environment, things get strange.

First, many places of employment have wifi access but not all of this wifi access is on the same broadcast domain, and therefore will not be seen by Bonjour. Although this shouldn’t be an issue in some cases I have seen the “same” wifi network cause issues when it was revealed the devices were actually grabbing IPs that weren’t part of identical broadcast domains.

Second, even if I get it working, for whatever reason sometimes it mysteriously gives up. In this case, I specifically believe it is an issue with the iOS system software. As it turns out, if I run a basic bonjour scanning application on my iPhone and can visibly see my desktop in the bonjour service list, it will suddenly appear in DTTG and start working. I used an iOS called Flame (movieos.org/code/flame-iphone/). If I have issues with DTTG I just open it up and do a hosts check for my desktop. This “unsticks” a broken sync dialogue in iOS.

Ultimately I think a lot of DTTG’s issues are related to bonjour resolving properly on the wifi network you are using. Like all users I am hoping for an iCloud based solution, but hopefully these tips can help some users sort out why their bonjour connectivity is misbehaving so poorly.

Thank you very much for summing this up.

The new sync technology will also use Bonjour but in addition offer over-the-air syncs using Dropbox and WebDAV.