Friday, January 7, 2011

An interesting iPad/Traveler situation this week

Had an interesting situation happen with an iPad this week that I wanted to share with the class.
A user brought our support team an iPad to set up for him.  Not a big deal, right?  Our team followed standard protocol for setting up the iPad, usually an extremely painless and quick process.  But after installing Traveler on the iPad, the device would not sync.  Thinking that an error had occurred during installation, they removed the Traveler account, I deleted the device on the server and they started over.  After another installation attempt, no go.  So to make sure that there was no problems with Traveler or his mail file, we used one of out test iPod Touch devices and set his account up on that.  No problem whatsoever.   Mail flow was fine. Calendar and contacts came down to the device also.  So it was back to head scratching time.  My advice was to have the user take the iPad to his home PC and with it connected, do a reset. in iTunes.  That usually wipes the device and resets everything back up.  That didn't help either.  We also noticed that even though nothing was syncing to the device, (no entries in the contacts, calendar or mail), that type ahead was bringing up some addresses in a new message.  Very odd since nothing was showing in the PIM apps.  I decided to hook up the iPad to my PC and use the iPhone Configuration Utility to look at the console of the iPad for anything weird.  I'm glad I did.  I started seeing a lot of weird errors like this:
Wed Jan  5 13:47:40 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd[265] <Notice>: terminate called after throwing an instance of '
Wed Jan  5 13:47:40 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd[265] <Notice>: NSException
Wed Jan  5 13:47:40 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd[265] <Notice>: '
Wed Jan  5 13:47:40 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad ReportCrash[268] <Notice>: Formulating crash report for process dataaccessd[265]
Wed Jan  5 13:47:40 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad ReportCrash[268] <Error>: Saved crashreport to /var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/dataaccessd_2011-01-05-134740_UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad.plist usinguid: 0 gid: 0, synthetic_euid: 501 egid: 0
Wed Jan  5 13:47:41 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd[265]) <Warning>: (com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd) Job appears to have crashed: Abort trap
Wed Jan  5 13:47:41 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd) <Warning>: (com.apple.dataaccess.dataaccessd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Wed Jan  5 13:47:41 UserFirstName-UserLastName-iPad kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[265] Builtin profile: dataaccessd (sandbox)

So obviously there was a problem on the device.  Our support team shared this information with the user, and it was agreed to wipe the device completely and set it up with a new account.  Once that was complete, Traveler set up and worked without a problem.  
So, what was the problem? Not sure.  We figure that somehow his account on the device became corrupt.  We knew it wasn't Traveler since it worked fine on the iPod Touch.  Truly and odd situation that was pretty much out of our league.
But my take away for you, dear reader, is if you have a growing user base and support a lot of these devices, get the iPhone Configuration Utility and also talk management into buying you an iPod Touch to have around for troubleshooting.  It can really pay off in the end.

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