Potential Solution: Home Sharing issues with iTunes 10.6

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Potential Solution: Home Sharing issues with iTunes 10.6

TL;DR: On a hunch, I changed the power settings of the ATV to never sleep. Since then, I have not had any issues. Granted, it's only been a couple of days, but it seems to have done the trick.

Folks,

Wanted to share my experience with Home Sharing issues after upgrading to iTunes 10.6. These forums a rampant with reports of the issue, so I'll defer to the search field above if you don't know what I am talking about. In short: iTunes 10.6 seems to have busted Home Sharing.

For those who do, here's what I found:

For some reason, is saw a very large number of established sessions from my Apple TV (ATV) into port 3689 on my Mac. This is the port that ATV uses to query iTunes to see what's available via Home Sharing (e.g.: what movies, songs, pictures, etc are available for display on the ATV).

A sniffer cap and some observation of the power indicator on the ATV indicated that while it was sleeping, the ATV was querying iTunes. It would power on for a sec (wake on LAN, maybe?), issue some queries, then sleep.

When this happened, the TCP sessions created were never town down. As such, I would eventually see 200+ established sessions on port 3689. I don't know exactly how many it took to make this happen, but when I saw this, iTunes stopped accepting new connections.

Of course, bouncing iTunes would remedy the issue for a while, but it would return.

On a hunch, I changed the power settings of the ATV to never sleep. Since then, I have not had any issues. Granted, it's only been a couple of days, but it seems to have done the trick.

I would be interested to hear if it works for others.

Happy viewing,

Chris

Posted on May 25, 2012 10:29 AM

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Answer 1

cjchand Author

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Jun 1, 2012 6:28 AM in response to cjchand

Just wanted to report back that this has, indeed, solved my issue. Well over a week now and no need to reset iTunes to get Home Sharing working again.

Hope that helps!

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Answer 2

Jun 1, 2012 7:09 PM in response to cjchand

Thanks for posting this.

I've been searching for an option of how to approach this problem.

I picked up the new AppleTV when it was released, but it has made iTunes fairly useless from a Home Sharing standpoint.

I also observed the massive number of TCP connections being opened against iTunes, but never closed.

As expected, I could manually kill a few of these connections, and then could connect again, even without closing iTunes.

I performed most of my testing with Windows 7, but while troubleshooting I had the same issue with iTunes on an old Mac Mini I had sitting around.

I will try your solution, which makes a lot of sense, but it would be nice if Apple fixed the real problem.

Thanks again.

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Answer 3

Richtuck

Level 1

4 points

Jun 7, 2012 6:56 AM in response to cjchand

Having been frustrated by the same problem and getting absolutely nowhere with Apple Support (very pleasant and patient people whoi remained on the phone for almost an hour) or any other form of help. My system has now been running and stable for over 6 hours which beats the previous record by some 4.5 hours. I will certainly report back if anything changes for the worse but in the mean time "Thank You" is all I can give.

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