I've been using bluetooth serial devices with OSX for years with no problems, many of these devices use alphanumeric security codes for pairing, not just numbers. Prior versions of OSX allowed you to enter the alpha codes, but lion appears to rerict to the code entry to numeric only.
Anyone know how to pair bluetooth from the command line or something that will allow alphas??
HELP!
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Granville Barker
I have the same problem here.
The code field in Lion accepts only numbers.
With "Snow Leopard" everything works.
I didn't find any hint if this is a bug or a feature.
But for me it looks like a bug in Lion. :-(
We figured out that if you say "no passcode", let it fail, then it will pop up a box for the passcode and that box will accept alpha numerics. ( I hope they don't "fix" that one too. )
'no passcode' is not working in our case. it never pops up an entry box. perhaps this varies by device?
OK Apple, we are on a sailboat in Panama, we cannot call for support, you won't allow email support and we can no longer communicate with our ssb radio because of this bug. It has been months and no response. I am a programmer, it would take one of your programmers 30 seconds to fix this. What gives?
So I had exactly this problem with my pactor modem too. I managed to work around it by pairing with the device from within windows running in VMware Fusion. It took a couple of attempts, but does pop up an OSX dialogue box into which you can type the alphanumeric passcode. From that point on, you can use the pactor via bluetooth from within Windows. I can drive the pactor quite happily this way.
Thanks for the info yesodyellowbelly. I had tried under Fusion before, but now that I know you had success I'll try again.
Be much easier if they just fixed it in Maverick, but not dared try that yet...
It's interesting that it still works internally, new OSX's can store and use alpha pairing, they just don't let you type it in. I successfully talked a higher tier tech into escalating the bug at an engineering meeting over a year ago but got no confirmation that engineering even considers it to be a bug. We have installed Maverick on one Macbook but can't find a device to test with here on land yet. Will try again when back on the boat.
It does seem like its just validation on the input. Hey ho - do report back if it now works on the latest OSX as that'll help me decide to upgrade...
Will do. Back to the boat in December but will try to coax a pairing code dialog out of another device before then. When pairing Apple products Maverick no longer shows the 'Passcode Options' button, just uses automatically generated pairing numbers which you can confirm or cancel. So it doesn't look good so far.
HELP / BUG: Bluetooth pairing , not allowing alpha characters in security code
