Cannot Activate Messages (iMessage) or Facetime in Mountain Lion 10.8

Question

Level 1

63 points

Cannot Activate Messages (iMessage) or Facetime in Mountain Lion 10.8

Evening all (or whatever time it is where/whenever you are),

There's a bunch of threads on this and I'm unsure which ones arer closest to my specific issue/cause, so I'm starting my own. Hopefully with all these conversations an answer can be found.

Just upgrade Lion to Mountain Lion. Upgrade went smoothly. All seems fine except when launching Messages or Facetime. In both cases, I am prompted for my AppleID and password, I enter them and get the error "Could not sign in. Please check your network connection and try again."

iMac7,1 (mid/late 2007), 2.8GHz, 4GB,
Lion was a clean install. Mountain Lion was an upgrade.
iMessage works fine on my iphone 4S with the same account
Router is actiontec MI424-WR to Verizon FiOS (for now, they're starting to annoy me)
Time is syced to apple's time servers. time zone is correct (Eastern), Router time is not but appears to be within a few seconds of mac
port 443 is open on router
mac firewall is off.

Here's what I have tried over the past few days, both from tips on this an other boards and my own intuition/knowledge:

deleted ~/library/preferences/... everything with messages, imagent, ichat, icloud, basically everything that looked like it might be relevant
think I may have deleted root prefs related to messages but now I can't remember for sure if there ever were any.
created a second user account on the mac, tried logging in from it.
killed imagent process and let it restart
repaired disk permissions (I still maintain this fixes 80% of problems 80% of the time)
deleted every keychain entry having to do with appleID or the email I use as my appleID
verified the keychain is ok
reinstalled ML

Anyone else got any other ideas?

Thanks much!

Jeff

Posted on Oct 26, 2012 5:00 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 27, 2012 2:02 PM in response to JSCooper

Hi,

The iMessages side of Messages and FaceTime use these ports.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4245

(Technically there are more for the "iChat Side" of Messages as well)

It is best if the router is using UPnP to open/allow ports.

Try adding a public DNS servers to System Preferences > Network > Advanced Button > DNS tab

Google run 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

It seems that for some reason some DNS servers cannot find the Apple Servers for iMessages and FaceTime (it is two different servers)

It may pay you add them to the router if you can add extra ones (some are limited to the two fields the numbers go in)

You could change the time server the router uses to be the same Apple Time Server.

It becomes quite important about the ability to Time Stamp the "Registration" process and later when sending IMs.

The other thing that some people are finding is that they have an Altered Hosts File.

Use the Finder > Go Menu > Go to Folder and enter /etc/hosts

This will take you to Hard Drive Name/Private/etc/ and highlight the Hosts file

You have to do it this way as the Private folder is hidden/Invisible.

The Hosts file should look like this

Uploaded with Skitch!

10:02 PM Saturday; October 27, 2012

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

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Reply

Answer 2

JSCooper Author

Level 1

63 points

Oct 27, 2012 7:53 PM in response to Ralph-Johns-UK

upnp is enabled

set the router ntp to time.apple.com

tried google's dns servers

hosts file is fine.

Thanks for the suggestions though. Do you ever sleep? Most of the things I've tried have some from your posts or responses. You're either really busy or have a lot of time on your hands. 🙂 In either case, much appreciated.

Jeff

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 28, 2012 12:35 PM in response to JSCooper

HI,

I do sleep.

I actually only spend about 3 hours a day here.

I do then try cover everything in the iChat Community and as many as I can in Mountain Lion > Messages.

The fact the router does UPnP is good, although you should not be doing Port Forwarding or Port Triggering at the same time.

This issue seems to be getting wider and wider in several ways

1) it seems to be effecting more people

2) the "fixes" that were working no longer seem to apply.

At this stage I would try "Repairing Permissions" with the Disk Utility and also try a PRAM reset.

Shut down the computer.

Restart it holding down Apple/CMD ( or ⌘)+ALT( ⌥)+P+R Keys until you have heard three Start Up Bongs.

After that I would Download the COMBO version of the OS X 10.8.2 update and install it over what you have.

7:35 PM Sunday; October 28, 2012

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

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Reply

Answer 4

famsim

Level 1

0 points

Dec 23, 2012 12:30 PM in response to JSCooper

What helped me was the following:

I had a missing serial number after a change of my logicboard some time before. The help desk of an Apple Shop set it for me again (computerstart with command "N").

After it I could activate iMessage and FacetTime error free and both worked properly.

Reply

Answer 5

Dec 23, 2012 1:40 PM in response to famsim

Good to hear.

9:40 PM Sunday; December 23, 2012

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

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Reply