Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

The forum for petitions, theoretical discussion, gripes, or other off topic discussion.

Moderator: James Steele

Forum rules
The forum for petitions, theoretical discussion, gripes, or other matters outside deemed outside the scope of helping users make optimal use of MOTU hardware and software. Posts in other forums may be moved here at the moderators discretion. No politics or religion!!
Post Reply
User avatar
Shooshie
Posts: 19820
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Dallas
Contact:

Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by Shooshie »

Actually, it started before El Capitan. I think the last time Messages.app or FaceTime.app worked on my Mac Pro was with the OS before Yosemite. What was that called? Some beach. I forget. Yosemite broke it. I hoped El Capitan would fix it, but it didn't.

I've spent uncountable hours trying to get these apps to log into my iCloud account so that I could use them. Everything I tried failed, not that it was my failure, but Apple's for making it so that it got so screwed up.

I checked the Apple support forums, and I found dozens of posts from people with exactly the same problems. Others would advise them to try basically everything that I'd tried, and sometimes bizarre and unnecessary things, but the members with the problems would post that those fixes did not work. Often people would say "this worked for me," but those who tried it would come back and say "but not for me." Everyone was getting really frustrated.

The one thing I had not done was log out from iCloud. Why? Because as soon as you click "log out," you start getting countless dialogs saying things like "this will delete all iCloud data from your Mac if you choose to continue." You click "OK," and then "are you sure you want to erase all your iCalendar files? Are you sure you want to delete your Notepad files? ...Contacts?" Previously, when I started getting those scare messages, I would cancel the whole thing. But that's (partly) why I never got it fixed. You have to log out of iCloud, set aside your old keychain file, and start over.

Then I went to FaceTime, which was pretty easy to fix at that point, and Messages.app, and got them working. Took a few tries at Messages, but soon I was sending texts.

Later, I put back my old Keychain file and logged back into iCloud, and after several tries at it, I was able to get them all working again... together. At this point Messages took a LOT more work. Several restarts, hundreds of attempts to log in, finally I started over enough times that something "took," and it all worked. I really didn't think it was going to, for a while. But as of now, I can safely say that I'm sending messages, doing FaceTime, and using my old Keychain entries, as well as using all my old iCloud data, and it's all working as it should have when I installed Yosemite and El Capitan.

To recap the steps I took, in case anyone else is having this problem:
  • • System Preferences / iCloud: Sign out of iCloud
    • Rename: ~/Library/Keychains to ~/Library/Keychains.old
    • Shut Down the Mac
    • Reboot the Mac (It didn't work until I actually shut it down, as opposed to restart, so save yourself a reboot cycle and shut down first)
    • FaceTime.app: Set up preferences and numbers.
    • iMessages / Preferences. (Login and manage accounts, etc. until you've got it all working)
    • System Preferences / iCloud (Login)
    • ~/Library/Keychains: swap the names so that your old keychain is now the current one, and the recently created keychain is now "Keychains.old"
    • Notice that you will need to have your iPhone handyd8sf
I hope nobody else is having this problem, but if you are, this may help you. In a forum where someone posted mostly similar steps, people were saying they got it to work, after everything else had failed them

The key is to understand that logging out of iCloud does not eliminate the things it deletes from your Mac. It will give you the option of saving your Safari keys, such as credit cards, site passwords, etc. Some things it saves locally, while all your calendar, contacts, and notes are still saved remotely on iCloud, itself, for the next time you log back in.

Just move slowly and think through everything. A false move MAY cause you data loss. Also, you'd better have your passwords handy. You'll be using them!

Shooshie
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
User avatar
cuttime
Posts: 4291
Joined: Sun May 15, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS

Re: Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by cuttime »

Thanks for the tips Shooshie. I've had numerous iCloud problems over the years, but somehow managed to resolve them. I'm amazed at how poorly Apple does cloud services. Google and Dropbox manage to do it effortlessly and seamlessly. You'd think a company once famous for refining things in an elegant fashion could break the code.
828x MacOS 13.6.5 M1 Studio Max 1TB 64G DP11.31
User avatar
Shooshie
Posts: 19820
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Dallas
Contact:

Re: Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by Shooshie »

Odd follow-up: After getting all that cloud stuff reset, suddenly Google Mail dumps 1600 gmails on me, dating back as far as 2007. If you ever wrote me on gmail and got nothing back... well... now we know.

Shooshie
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
User avatar
bayswater
Posts: 11924
Joined: Fri Feb 16, 2007 9:06 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Vancouver

Re: Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by bayswater »

I went through the iCloud logout login fix while on a support call with Apple when all my iTunes purchases disappeared. It was part of a series on ins and outs that included deauthorizing everything, reauthorizing everything, logging out and in, etc. It was probably somewhere around Mavericks (is that the beach?)

I got the impression the support agent might have been through the drill a few thousand times before she heard from me. I can only guess Apple did some sort of user database change that messed up everyone's iTunes, iCloud, iNag settings.
2018 Mini i7 32G 10.14.6, DP 11.3, Mixbus 9, Logic 10.5, Scarlett 18i8
User avatar
mikehalloran
Posts: 15134
Joined: Sun Jan 25, 2009 5:08 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Sillie Con Valley

Re: Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by mikehalloran »

I stumbled through it myself, made worse by having Yahoo mail.

As far as I can tell, the key is to have iOS up to date. After that, the rest was pretty easy.
DP 11.31; 828mkII FW, micro lite, M4, MTP/AV USB Firmware 2.0.1
2023 Mac Studio M2 8TB, 192GB RAM, OS Sonoma 14.4, USB4 8TB external, M-Audio AIR 192|14, Mackie ProFxv3 6/10/12; 2012 MBPs Catalina, Mojave
IK-NI-Izotope-PSP-Garritan-Antares, LogicPro X, Finale 27.4, Dorico 5.2, Notion 6, Overture 5, TwistedWave, DSP-Q 5, SmartScore64 Pro, Toast 20 Pro
User avatar
Shooshie
Posts: 19820
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Dallas
Contact:

Re: Craziness with Messages.app & FaceTime.app in El Capitan

Post by Shooshie »

iPhone and iPad are always bleeding-edge up-to-date. Didn't have the problem with the Macbook Pro. Mac Pro tower had the problem. I focused on that problem periodically for over 2 years, not wanting to call Apple and having to do the song and dance routine before they will even start helping you. (Is your Mac plugged in? Is your router working and plugged in? Do a Restart your Mac. Reset the PRAM. Run Disk Permissions. Did you say 'may I' when you upgraded your OS? You didn't? Then make a clone of your drive, then erase it and reinstall everything. Call back when you're done.)

I noticed in the forums that for a lot of people it was the Mac Pro. Does the Mac Pro have some kind of ROM? (I'm under the impression that ROMs went away over a decade ago...)
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
Post Reply