iChat doesn't automatically reconnect after wake from sleep

Hi,

When in sleep the Network connections are shut down.
There can be an issue when Apps are woken but faster than the Network is re-established.

A Manual Login is one way.

An AppleScript is likely to be the "Automatic" solution.



10:54 PM Thursday; January 28, 2010

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Hi,

I would ask how fast you went from Snow Leopard base (10.6) to 10.6.2
Did you use iChat enough to notice it in say 10.6 or 10.6.1 ?

In simple terms Snow Leopard is Leopard with the PowerMac PPC code removed.
This means it runs faster.

This maybe enough to make a difference.

iChat 2 relied on an External Camera and had a Setting in the Video Section to Start Up iChat when the Cameras was Plugged in.
This tended to be enough to get the Network re-established.
The phrasing has changed through iChat 3 and 4 to the Leopard phrase about External Cameras specifically as the Internal iSights are always there.

There is a Setting in the General Section of the iChat Preferences where you can set what iChat does on coming back to an Idle Computer.
If you set it to ask You it may be enough to change the Status Message to force the Reconnection - Couple this with the higher item to set the Status to Away on Idle (Inactive).



8:47 PM Friday; January 29, 2010

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

I have this problem also, although I believe it started for me as soon as I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I think it sometimes works correctly for me when I am connecting through AirPort, but iChat never reconnects on wake when my network connection is through Ethernet.

Ralph is incorrect. It is not an issue of timing. What a horrible OS it would be if that was how things worked. If the network connection is lost, for instance, and then comes up again, iChat, up all along, used to notice when the network connection came back. Indeed, OS X sends out a notification to apps that are interested whenever network connectivity becomes available, so whenever that happens, iChat should attempt to reconnect.

This is clearly some kind of bug but I'm not sure if there are any workarounds.

UPDATE: I think this is, as you suspected, some kind of preferences corruption issue. It may have been from adding or deleting accounts that I no longer use (formerly I had an extra Jabber account and some AIM accounts but at some point I deleted all but a single Jabber account).

I closed iChat and used Activity Monitor to kill iChatAgent, then I deleted all of the iChat preference files, ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat.* , there were probably 4 or 5 of them. I then restarted iChat and was greeting with the first-launch configuration window, I set up a single Google Talk account and now iChat reconnects automatically every time I wake my computer. What a relief! 🙂

I deleted my preference files which didn't seem to do anything. I re-setup all my accounts, changed a preference back to "When I return to my computer, if my status is Away: Set my status to Available." It was set there before, but after deleting prefs and resetting this one, it seemed to do the trick. All my accounts now login automatically.

Do you happen to use Chax (iChat add-on)? I had a similar issue, where every time my computer would wake from sleep, iChat would tell me that I was not connected to the internet right before my airport established a connection.

I put up with this behavior for a while, until I noticed an update, Chax 3.0.1, which mentioned the wake-from-sleep bug. I just installed the update and am unable to reproduce the connection hiccup (it happened very consistently before).

Well it worked for me for a little while anyway. It has now gone back to its old behavior. I have seen other people reporting the problem in comments on the iChax blog, so maybe it is widespread enough that Apple will fix in an upcoming update. The newest version of iChax claims to try to work around the bug but I don't like installing add-ons so I haven't tried it.

Ah so actually now it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't: if I am connected to Ethernet and to Airport both, then it does not work, but if I am connected to only one, then it does work. In fact, if I wake my computer with both connected, iChat will remain in 'Offline' mode, but then I can cause it to connect by either pulling the Ethernet out or disabling Airport.

Yep, iChat does not like two connections.

It can not resolve the two IPs you get.



8:43 PM Wednesday; March 17, 2010

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"