ActiveSync Primal Scream
July 8, 2003
One of the areas where Palm OS has Windows CE Pocket PC Windows Mobile beat hands down is on synchronization.
Hotsync just works on Palm OS—in the cradle, on a wireless connection, over a pair of tin cans and a string if necessary.
At least for me.
I have been fighting with (Windows Mobile) ActiveSync 3.7 for 10 days. It works fine in the cradle (an improvement from previous versions), but connecting wirelessly, it expects to be able to resolve a name via WINS.
Which is fine, if you’re somewhere with a WINS server visible to your wireless connection, which not a lot of people are.
The solution you usually see suggested is to use Pocket Hosts to add a Hosts file entry on the mobile device for the desktop name. Turning over all of the rocks found on Google with ActiveSync’s name on them, you find that for some people this works great, for others, they keep getting connected as “Guest”, and unable to sync.
I of course fell in the latter group.
However, after 10 days of pulling my hair out, I FINALLY figured this one out.
DNS names are case insensitive. For the most part, Microsoft Networking names are case insensitive.
Today, on the one billionth pass through this, I noticed that ActiveSync on my mobile listed the desktop name in all caps. I had it in all lower case in Pocket Hosts.
Change the Pocket Hosts entry to all caps, and bada-bing, the damn thing syncs.
Sheesh.
Apologies for the rant.
don’t apologize, I suspect you solved my activsynch problems. one fun adventure I had with my toshi usb activsynch was resolved by the toshi support guy (I adore 24/7 chat support) asking what version of as are you using? 3.7 I replied, he immediately said we only support 3.5
Well, I wish you the best with it… I wish I could say that it was the final problem I had.
That did indeed work to make wireless sync work without needing a WINS reference, but ActiveSync over GPRS dialup kicked my butt—no matter what I did (including basically dropping my desktop fully exposed on it’s own address for awhile), every attempt would die on “a critical communications resource could not be something or other”. I don’t know what it was; whether I’m using wi-fi or dialup should be transparent to my desktop, but it obviously wasn’t—possibly it’s a timing issue, or perhaps one of the critical ActiveSync ports is blocked by the GPRS bearer (the entire fucking world-wide web works over 2 damn ports, but ActiveSync needs at least 4 to diddle a PPC).
I finally ran out of minutes, and ended up going with a straight POP3 approach, which will work adequately for awhile, leaving aside that it would be nice to have a decent stand-alone PPC POP3 client (like SnapperMail on Palm) that was not built into Inbox nor dependant on a working ActiveSync connection.
- Chuck
really nice find tho. Sorry you had to go through all the trouble.
lol… Not a big deal, just life out on the bleeding edge. Some degree of having to figure this stuff out is just part of the game, what geeks do instead of having a life some days…
It all turned out to be moot anyway—I got here, and I can’t get GPRS connectivity whatsoever, despite T-Mobile showing it as being in their coverage area. It turns out the service is through a local carrier here that doesn’t seem to expose any GPRS (which I think always has to be a possibility with GSM).
So I’m doing the old “buy a month’s worth of dialup to check my mail for a few days” thing; it’s a good thing I tossed in my old laptop at the last minute. Unfortunately, I was planning on doing a fair amount of moblogging from my phone and pda, and since they’re data-enert right now, I guess I won’t be doing that, or if I do, it’ll be the first of the week before anything gets posted….
Life in the misconnected lane
Hi. Noble rant! Microshaft needs to get their act together with respect to synchronization. I had minor fits with my iPAQ h3835 a few months ago getting it to sync wirelessly (the WINS trick of setting the WINS address to the computer’s IP address worked for me.) and now I’m having MAJOR fits with this new iPAQ h5550. (funny enough the active sync software is the same version 3.7.1)
I had the problem fixed so I could sync wirelessly and I ran a backup (the backup utility on the ipaq) and when I soft-reset the ipaq the problem came back.
Disclaimer: Work with the registry at your own risk.
I decided to look in the registry on the ipaq using EdReg 1.0 and I found a key called “username” with a value of “guest” under the ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Ident’ folder. In the same folder I also found a key called “OrigName” that had the value of the original name my iPAQ had. the “name” key had the current name of the iPAQ.
while I was messing around with some things I set the WINS address to the IP of my Windows XP machine that I sync with (Recommended by another article on the net, which worked for my last iPAQ with the same ActiveSync)
So after trying some variations I set the username key, origname key, and the name key to the same thing. I removed the username key. I soft-reset a number of time. I remove all the hosts (using that pockethosts utility (which I found out hosts are stored in the registry also) and I readd the hostname and ip of the computer I want to sync with.
AND WITHOUT A SOFT-RESET I tell it to sync and WHALA! it no longer says the dreaded “Guest” message. and then I do a soft-reset and the damn thing goes back to saying “Guest” when it syncs…what a pain in the butt!!!!!
I hope this sheds some light on the reoccuring problem for someone and they find a better fix than I. Removing the host/ip and readding it without a soft-reset is kinda a pain in the butt for something that should just work!.
there’s my 2 cents. I hope it helps someone.
-Tor