iOS 5 Wireless iTunes sync..Not really wireless or what?

A bit of an update on our situation with this. The WiFi facilities disapear one by one on our phones, synching, air play to the apple TV. Turning the router off an on brings it all back for a bit and since the last reset it has stayed up for a day so far.

The router is the standard one supplied by O2. When a device is first updated it works once then gives up while the other devices still work. Update another device and it does the same. Since everything has been updated all turned off and restarted it seems OK.

My conclusion is that something in the first use of the WiFi facilities from a device upset the router. Whether this is IOS5 or a weakness of the router I can't say all I can conclude is it's been a painful process. Now to update to Lion.

SUCCESS!

After hours of reinstalling iTunes, reconfiguring my network, fiddling with firewall settings, etc, I finally found the setting that was preventing me from syncing via wifi.

I found a setting on my wifi router for "IGMP Snooping". I disabled that bad boy and voila, wifi sync is working flawlessly!

Before I changed that setting, I was diagnosing the network with the "Bonjour Browser" app. I cannot recommend it enough for folks having similar problems. I installed the app on both my iPhone 4s and desktop, and fundamentally discovered that they could see themselves, but could not see each other.

Basically, by disabling IGMP Snooping, multi-cast traffic (which is vital to Bonjour's - and thus wifi sync's - architecture) is allowed to flow more freely on the network.

Hi All,

I thought I would share my experience on how I actually got this to work in the long run, as I had experienced similar behaviour to all those described here. My setup is Win7(x64), iTunes 10.5, 3Gs with iOS 5.

The computer would not see the iPhone when the cable was unplugged from the USB cable, likewise the iPhone would not see the computer and the 'Sync Now' button was greyed out.

1. In iTunes, with the iPhone connected via USB, on the iPhone Summary page enable "Sync this iPhone over Wi-Fi".

2. Perform a Full Sync.

3. Disconnect the USB Cable.

4. Enable Wi-Fi on the Laptop ... Yes, this was a necessary step. It did not seem to like it if the laptop was connected via Ethernet Cable to the wireless router. Only when Wi-Fi was enabled on the Laptop device itself did it activate the function on the iPhone and the iPhone would appear in iTunes.

Technically it works, but seems a little limited.

I know this sounds really simple, but you pretty much need to reboot everything for this to work. Turn off your portable device, close down iTunes on your desktop/laptop and reboot your router. Mine just started working after I did those three things. I had previously tried solely rebooting my iPad 2 but it didn't work. Hopefully there will be no problems from now on.

I have an intermittant problem, I've reset the router (newest BT Home Hub), restarted the computer (MacBook Pro running latest software, latest version of iTunes) restarted my iPad2 and iPhone 4 both running latest iOS5 and yet the wireless sync only sometimes works. Very frustrating as I can't tell why it occassionally works, and mostly doesn't, and when I try the above steps, why sometimes restarting the devices works, and sometimes it doesn't, same for the other steps. Even more frustrating when it'll sync one of the devies but "can't find" the other.

Tara - did you try toggling the IGMP Snooping feature on your wifi router/AP, if it exists? I was having intermittent issues, and that turned out to positively be the issue. I needed to disable IGMP Snooping for my network, but I have read that others needed to enable it. Try it both ways, if you have the option to.

I can't find where to see if IGMP snooping is turned on or disabled. I've signed into the HomeHub, but can't seem to find where that setting would be. 😟

it appears that the symptom of a greyed out 'sync now' button is a symptom with many possible complex root causes, due to everybody having a different type of local network topology and configuration settings.

in my case, the portable iphone device constantly drifts in and out of wifi and my machine goes on and off from suspend/sleep mode. actions like these causes them to come and go from the network.

due to these activities, and, among many other options, the router has a choice of whether to keep these devices on the same ip address or change it to a different one -depending on things like leasing ip addresses(reserving them or assigning them a different number) for home network management.

first off, i would suggest turning on and off wifi on each device(machine and ios device) to see if that would reset things.

if it doesn't work, you can reboot a device one at a time and see if it fixes it. then, go down the line from there.

or, to keep things simple, reboot all of them at the same time: your router, your machine where itunes is running, and your ios 5 device. once they're all connected again, they should see each other -unless, otherwise your wifi sync wasn't enabled in the first place, or there's a setting that is blocking bonjour from working (as seen above with changing igmp settings).

in my case, the router logs show that my machine had two ip addresses recorded, as well as my ios device -due to the activities mentioned earlier. by simply turning on and off wifi i was able to reset the ip reservations, preventing duplicates and any confusion it may have caused.

simply turning on and off wifi on my machine seemed to have solved my problem and cleared the router's ip reservation list.

as i've said in the beginning, it appears to be different causes for the same symptom. try these suggestions and see if they work.

It is also important to check if the programs are actually listening on the necessary ports. I have two PC running Windows and WiFi sync only worked on one of them.

I checked the difference between them and found that TCP 3389 was not listened by any program on PC "A" that's not working while iTunes was listening on that port on the other PC "B". I then found that "Home Sharing" in iTunes was turned off for PC "A". I turned it on, restarted iTunes and WiFi sharing began to work on PC "A".

I was able to get it to sync(work) but please remember to do a standard wired manual backup....When I did a wifi sync I lost my contacts. So please do a wired back up first!!!!

if you have a copy of your contacts from your machine you can transfer it back to your device.

but, if you lost all your contacts on your machines and device, and know for sure that you have backed up your device recently, you can do a full restore from the most recent backup. it depends how important your contacts or other lost data are, as this might entail going back to an earlier setup and then going forward again from there.

the possible risk will be any changes you made after that backup could possibly be lost -it's hard to say. one way to do a full restore is to right click on the device icon on the left panel in itunes and select 'restore'. that option is different than the one in the main screen. from there, you can pick the date of the most recent backup.

on a mac in order to see the most recent backup that was made, they might be found under: username/library/application support/mobile sync/backup with the newest backup folder dated the most recent.

with a bit of foresight, if you want to get into detail with your ios device without jailbreaking it, there's a free application called iexplorer that will let you view the contents of your ios device and make specific backups by copying it over manually. you can google it to find the application.

For those who cannot wi-fi sync your devices with itunes, hopefully this will help.

For some people the normal "do this" set of instructions don't work to fix the problem that prevents the computer with itunes from being available in the iOS wifi sync panel, preventing iTunes from seeing the wi-fi enabled device.... I know I was one of them.

I have done several times the "do this" instructions everyone keeps posting before I could say it's not a user problem...

YES you need to be able to tell itunes to allow syncing of your device over wi-fi (the dreaded checkbox on the device summary tab) when it's cable attached

YES you need to reboot your computer

YES you need to start iTunes from a rebooted computer

YES you need to restart your ipod/iphone/ipad

YES you need to wait for the full moon and proceed to drive your neighours nuts by yodelling at 3:00am

I was able to sync my iphone 3gs ONCE and never again, and certainly not on the first attempt... I was also never able to sync my ipod, ever... Most of the time, I had the "cannot sync right now, waiting for your <computer> to become available" message (exact phrase is something else).

What seems to confuse a lot of people is that because it works once, means it will work every time. My experience tells me if it works intermittently , it's a fluke it worked at all.... If you're like most people who use windows (dunno about the mac) and upgraded itunes to 10.5 then upgraded the iOS to version 5, you will very likely have nothing but trouble until the root cause is addressed.

Bonjour is the service that announces itunes and devices out there to each other and reads the responses from other bonjour enabled devices, so all parties know that everybody else is out there. Whatever apple did, they must have made it unstable or unreliable only where wi-fi sync is concerned because the only thing I have not been able to do was to see wi-fi devices in itunes or itunes from the devices through wi-fi.

I could airplay from the devices, so the device had no issues with the airport expresses. I could control my itunes via the remote app, so the device had no issue communicating with itunes. I had no problem with itunes seeing my airport expresses, so bonjour wasn't completely borked..... The issue was that from the ipod/iphone to itunes, neither end believed the other was there, but that everything else out there was good to go.

As pointed by others, you need to go nuclear on the itunes as suggested by this guy http://cnx.com/?p=1612

Well, I sort of did what Pab suggested (the link provided in this post)....

I uninstalled all that could be installed or could have ever been installed at some point in the past by the itunes installer (safari, quicktime, bonjour, icloud, mobile me, etc), manually purged the registry of all entries pertaining to the "bonjour" program (I won't say how so you can't blame me for messing your computer up, only that you can use ccleaner or similar tool which may well do other or unrelated damage), told VISTA (yes, that's right I'm ashamed to say, I am running vista) to pretend all apple products are unknown to the firewall app, rebooted, reinstalled itunes via the itunes installer app downloaded from apple's web site, rebooted again, and it worked as it should after two separate reboot attempts... That is, when I start itunes, itunes sees the devices (even when they're not plugged in to power), and the devices allow me to manually sync with itunes (the "sync" button is not grayed out with the "waiting for <computer> to become available" message

Work has been insane for me lately, so this was my first shot at finally being able to tackle this problem.

http://cnx.com/?p=1612

DING DING DING. This site is gold. I confess I was on pins and needles uninstalling iTunes. I have ratings for about 18,000 songs and over 100 custom playlists. I'd backed everything up, but if iTunes forgot all my stuff, it would have been a royal PITA to restore everything.

Thankfully, it all worked perfectly. The uninstall and registry clean were smooth, and iTunes re-installed without a problem and picked up my old library file without a hitch. And sure enough, I could immediately trigger a sync from my iPhone. As the site said, the phone didn't even need to be plugged in to initiate a sync.

Reading the rest of this thread, I don't know if wireless sync will work next time. But I'm thankful I got this working for now; like I said, I've been looking forward to this feature for awhile.

Rebooting EVERYTHING is the key. Follow all steps mentioned above in the posts and reboot, router, ipod/iphone, computer. I did in the same order. It worked like a charm.

I haven't been able to get this working.

Using:

iphone 4 (not 4s)

Windows 7 x64 bit

It will work on the phone IF IT IS CONNECTED TO THE PC. (can do wireless sync when not wireless...)

If I connect only to the charging cable, it won't work.

One thing I was wondering:

Will this only work if the PC you're using has wireless? I have my pc plugged into the router with a cable, but the router is wireless. Wireless works fine on my wife's PC and my phone. Maybe the PC that itunes is installed on has to have wireless? Kind of pointless if you already have it hooked up wired.

Other thoughts:

I figure this is such a new feature that I don't expect it to work reliably yet. I'm sure Apple was in a rush to release ios 5 on the day the 4S came out. As a result, we ended up essentially with a beta product that is now the official release...

I figure give Apple a month to catch up and maybe then this will work as it should.

Also note: I'm a network admin. My home PC is only about a year old, has 4 GB's RAM, Quad core AMD Phenom II. itunes worked fine in the last release. Ever since the update, it bogs down my PC when opened and I have to end task on it all the time. One of my customers with a BRAND NEW PC is also having this problem with itunes bogging down his CPU usage (memory usage is fine). This is why I figure this recent upgrade is a buggy release. They basically said: 'hey the new phone is coming out tomorrow, this release is good enough for now...'