Blog: Apple

Last week one day I had a message popup on my iPhone which said my Voicemail password was wrong.  The message caught me off-guard because I wasn’t trying to access my Voicemail and I hadn’t made any changes recently.  Also, I wasn’t sure if it was my voicemail with AT&T or my office voicemail in Cisco’s integrated messaging.  Since I was busy with other things, I didn’t pursue it.

After a couple of days, the message appeared again.  This time I thought I should find out what was happening.

I selected the button (don’t remember the name) to get more details and I learned it was the password with the AT&T.  On my iPhone I went to Settings > Phone > Change Voicemail Password.  There I was prompted to put in my old password (really just a four digit PIN).  I entered the old one which it took (so it means my old password was still valid with AT&T) then entered a new password, which was accepted.  Behind the scenes my phone updated my password.  After exiting Settings, two new voicemail messages appeared. [more]

The gotcha is not new, just surprising in its occurrence.  I had updated my iPhone to iOS 4.x.  I knew the update did not keep up with passwords, but I had reentered email passwords and VPN keys, etc. and everything I could think of at the time.  All appeared to be working.

The Voicemail password error didn’t not appear until a couple of weeks after my iOS update.  The time span was sufficient for me to not realize it was all a part of the update.  The long duration was because I had not received any voicemail.  When I did receive a Voicemail, my iPhone, which after the update did not have any password, tried to authenticate to AT&T and caused the error to appear.

So, after updating to iOS 4.x be prepared for weeks or months of password errors or requests.  Every time you attempt to contact a vendor of an App who had required you to register, you will need to reenter you password.  The message may say the password is wrong, but it really means the password which had been stored on your iPhone has been deleted.  Probably your password is not wrong, just missing.

I started receiving unwanted automated calls on my iPhone late one night.  Some automated calling service was calling my number about once an hour and there was only a recorded voice on the other side.  I needed to have my phone on and the ringer loud because I was expecting an important phone call early the next morning.  Muting the phone was not an option.  While searching for a solution, I found this website: [http://www.mylittleportal.com/call-block-cell-phone-number-iphone] “How to block any phone number on your iPhone for free”

The process is very quick, easy, and free:

1. Download this silent ringtone to your computer.
2. Open iTunes and copy the ringtone.
3. Sync your iPhone.
4. Make a new contact with the number you want to block and assign the silent ringtone to the contact.
5. Get a full night’s sleep.

Recently, I received a Sharper Image CG-C140 Portable Folding Charging Valet which came with an adapter to use for charging my iPhone.

The first time I plugged my iPhone in, I could hear what sounded to be a high pitched electrical noise coming from the station.  As I left my phone to charge overnight, I woke up the next day to find the battery was drained.  I thought maybe I didn’t have it connected securely, so I plugged it in to the iPhone wall charger later that day.  A few days later, I put the phone on the charging valet again and woke up to a completely drained battery.  I know that it had “chirped” indicating that it was plugged in to a charger before I sat it down. 

This time, things were different.  As I mumbled about this piece of junk not working, I plugged the iPhone wall charger into the iPhone and pressed the power button.  My phone wasn’t booting up.  Ok, I’ll give it a few minutes and come back.  Still nothing.  I unplugged the charger cable and reconnected it, and there were no “chirps” or sign of life.  I decided that maybe this valet fried my battery, so I headed to the nearest AT&T store.  On the way to the store, I had my phone plugged into a car charger, and it wasn’t working either. [more]

AT&T said, you can buy another phone in the mean time, and we can send the phone to Apple for repairs.  It’ll take a few weeks to get it back, and I need my phone for work.  This brought up the obvious question, “Do I return the extra phone when I get mine back?”  No, I would then own TWO iPhones.  What!?  Ok, I’m heading to the Apple store in the mall a few miles up the road.  By now you can probably guess my opinion of AT&T.

Upon arriving to the Apple store, they told me that I would have to talk to someone in the technology “bar”.  Yes, they have some kind of cool tech bar.  Oh, and the wait time was about 3 hours.  I thought Apple products were supposed to be trouble free according to all of the television commercials.  Obviously, people have a lot of problems they need help with.

In the mean time, I used one of their Macs to search for similar weird charging issues.  One post I came across said that their phone’s charging function had been “stuck” in a state that it wouldn’t do anything.  Some lucky person had discovered that if they had their phone plugged into their PC through the USB charging cable, they could send a “jolt” to the phone that made it start charging again by shutting down the PC and then the PC back on.

Well, where I am now, all I have available is a car charger cable.  I got back in the car, started the engine, plugged in the car charger cable to the phone, turned off the car, turned on the car, and shortly after, my phone was able to be turned on and charged.  Two months later, I haven’t had any other problems with my iPhone battery.

Back several months ago I tried to update my laptop to Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6).  Most things worked great, but at the end of the week when I started doing some of my reports, I noticed lots of file system problems.  The Word documents I was editing would become read-only after I saved them once.  New documents I created would be read-only.  As I got to digging, I found that any files I created on the file server were being created with empty permissions (as viewed from my laptop), and read-only permissions (via the checkbox) as viewed from the Windows side.  I found lots of people having the same problem with no real workaround.  I noticed the permissions would fix when I viewed them from the Finder, or when I did an ‘ls –l’ from the command line.  I restored my system back to Leopard from my backup (which was nice to have available) and waited for a fix.  Well, the fix came in the recent release of Snow Leopard 10.6.3.  I’ve updated again and everything works great.

There is a new iPhone worm that uses the insecure SSH service installed on jailbroken iPhones.  Last week, there was discussion about an attack on iPhone users in the Netherlands where the attackers demanded owners pay 5 EUR to get rid of the Trojan.

"Jailbroken" (or hacked) iPhones or iPod Touch devices are devices where users have bypassed Apple's official distribution and are running unofficial code.  Once an iPhone or iPod Touch is jailbroken, users are able to download various applications previously unavailable through Apple's App Store from unofficial installers such as Cydia or Rock App.

To learn more, visit http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7549

Progress. Innovation. One small step for man. Call it what you will but the advancement of software usually comes at a price with some bumps along the way. Apple, while a good company that puts out a good product, is mortal like the rest of us and as such is subject to the same development bumps and bruises. That was my experience this week when an executive assistant at one of our clients came to me in a panicked state saying “Help! I just sent out a meeting invite to over 30 executives and it keeps sending the invitation over and over and over again! People are getting upset!” [more]

Immediately I put together a lineup of potential offenders and began working my way through:

1. Exchange message queues
2. Online spam filter reinjection
3. Notification of meeting change/update
4. Corrupt/Malformed meeting event
5. Possible wrong address in the list (we’ve seen this happen before) 
6. MAPI profile/client issues.

Troubleshooting:

1. An inspection of the Exchange queues revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and the Exchange logs showed that each repeated meeting request appeared to be a new/separate message that was being received (and dutifully sent out) by the Exchange server. Nope, that’s not it.
2. Online spam filter reinjection into Exchange was not a possibility since every recipient was internal… the spam service never saw the message. Innocent.
3. Since the same meeting was supposedly being re-sent, I thought that it may be possible that the meeting would re-send whenever a user would update/respond to/propose a new meeting time for the calendar event. After looking at the executive assistant’s sent items as well as the inboxes of several attendees, none of this was true… the meetings were actually being re-sent. Strike three. 
4. Thinking that there may be some oddity in the meeting event such as a reoccurring event, I had the user delete the meeting then recreate it while I watched. I noticed the user used a distribution list when inviting attendees.
5. Some of our engineers have seen some quirks when using a distribution list with incorrect/invalid email addresses. I had the user recreate the distribution list from scratch, populating it only by clicking on addresses in the Global Address List. Re-created the meeting with new distribution list. Same behavior.
6. Thinking that the problem may be a MAPI profile issue due to the Exchange logs indicating that each message was a separate submission from the client, I went to the user’s office to rebuild their MAPI profile. In doing so I realized that the user was on a thin client. Before building her Terminal Server MAPI profile I asked the user what time she had left the previous day. She said she left right at 5:00pm and had logged off of the Terminal Server at that time. The last meeting that was resent went out at 5:14pm. Hmmm…

Solution:

At this point I had seemingly ruled out the client aspect as well as the server aspect of the problem, what could be left? Blackberry! I asked the executive assistant if she had a Blackberry, thinking that surely the Blackberry Enterprise Server was the guilty party since the problem was happening when she was logged out. “No, I don’t have a Blackberry… a couple of months ago I got an iPhone instead.” At this point I was getting desperate so I asked her to power off her phone for the remaining 6 hours of the workday. Magically not a single meeting invite was sent out. After that I asked her to power it on. Immediately a repeated meeting invite was sent! I asked her if anything had changed on her phone recently to which she replied ,”actually, I just upgraded my phone this weekend to the new 3.0 iPhone OS”. A quick Google confirmed that other users who had upgraded to the 3.0 Apple iPhone OS and had sent meeting requests to a distribution groups had experienced the same problem. A call to Apple support yielded no help as a “Product Specialist” (referred to as “iPhone Ninjas” by Apple Tier 1 support, no joke) told me that they don’t have any record of that happening to anyone else, call Microsoft since it’s an Exchange account.  So, until iPhone OS 3.1, it looks like users will not be able to use distribution groups when creating meeting requests. Isn’t there an App for that?