Techno-Babble

Apple download failures are ruining my life

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to update my iPhone to the new 2.2.1 firmware, but the download always failed.  Same with downloading a new version iTunes.  Tried and tried and tried.

Then today I got fed up, tracked down the url for manually downloading it (this forum thread is a good source).  But it still didn’t work!  It kept hanging after a couple of minutes.

Eventually I realized that it might have something to do with my router settings.  I had set connections to time out after 120 seconds in order to better handle lots of bit torrent traffic.  It’s usually not a problem, as my browsers are usually able to resume downloads when connections are broken, even when I lose internet connectivity completely.  But perhaps there’s something about edge / content delivery network downloads that requires a persistent connection.  Anyway, I raised my connection timeout to 600 seconds and now all my Apple downloads are working fine.

Update: scratch that.  Didn’t work totally fine.  The iPhone update still keeps hanging and eventually dying.  Now I’m trying to nurse it along by occasionally “pausing” and “resuming” the download in Google Chrome.  Looks like it might work, if I’m attentive.  What a beating.

Update 2: So nursing it along proved to be too tedious.  After 45min of starting and stopping, it failed at 240/246M!  Arrgggh!  So now I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with the wifi.  So this time I SSH’d into my Linux server (which is wired to the net), used wget to download, and it took 5 minutes.

Update 3: Scratch that.  It turns out I downloaded the update for the 3G iPhone instead of my 1st generation iPhone.  The first generation firmware update keeps failing over and over and over.  It’s killing me.  Somehow I got the 3G version, 246M, in an amazing 5 minutes, but the download for my phone is coming in at 50k/s and stalling out at around 2% complete.  This is ridiculous.

Tags: Annoyances, networking