Remote works for a while, then fails to connect

I've updated to the 2.01 iPhone firmware but that made no difference.

This is seeming less like a configuration issue and more like an Apple bug. But where is the bug? In OS X, iTunes, the iPhone, or the Remote app?

My wife has an iPhone too so I'll have to test the Remote app on hers instead, to see if that makes a difference.

I've now tested this on a second iPhone, and the situation is the same: the Remote app fails to connect to iTunes after a while. So the problem is not specific to my particular iPhone.

That rules out one possibility, but still doesn't tell us exactly where the problem lies: in the iPhone OS? In the Remote app? In OS X? In iTunes?

Surely I can't be the only one with this problem? But searching the net doesn't reveal much on this issue... although the fact that there's a different (hardware) product called "Apple Remote" makes it hard to search for stuff related to the software Remote.

Is upgrading from Tiger to Leopard likely to help?

I just upgraded from Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5); that did not fix the problem.

...aaaaand I've now upgraded from 10.5.1 to 10.5.4; that also didn't fix the problem.

I've discovered that disabling & re-enabling the computer's network connection does fix the problem. So as a workaround, I've created 2 new "Locations" in my Mac's network preferences, one called "Online" and the other "Offline", in the latter of which I've just disabled all the network adapters. I then created the following script (which I named togglenet.sh):

#!/bin/sh
scselect Offline
sleep 5
scselect Online

So I can execute that by SSHing from my iPhone to my Mac. Or I might install Apache on my Mac so I can make a CGI script out of it, so I'd just need to hit the page using Safari to run it.

So, at least there is a workaround; but I REALLY hope Apple just fixes this friggin' bug.

I've put together a decent setup using this workaround, so that you can reset your Mac's network connection from your iPhone with just 2 taps, thus fixing this problem. Full instructions are here:

http://encodable.com/tech/blog/2008/08/16/Workaroundfor_the_Could_not_find_Library_Problem_with_the_iPhone_RemoteApp

Yes, I did discover that. I use that already-installed version of Apache in the instructions that I posted at the link above.

Apache installed by default: yet another reason why working on a Mac is so much more convenient than working on a Windows system...

That's not the solution in my case (and I suspect not in the general case), since I've completely disabled my firewall, i.e. it's wide open already, and yet the problem still exists.

To use my workaround on Vista instead of OS X, you'd first need to install Apache. That's not especially hard but not exactly trivial either. But the real issue would be whether Vista provides command-line utilities that let you enable/disable the network, or switch network profiles/locations, as the scselect command on OS X does. If such a utility exists in Vista, then yes, this workaround could be implemented on Vista. But there's no guarantee that it would fix the problem on Vista, as it (temporarily) does on OS X, since we're still not sure exactly where the problem lies.

It looks like switching my Mac from a wired to a wifi connection may have fixed this problem. It's only been about one day, but so far I don't think this problem has happened a single time when the Mac is using wifi.