Wi-fi connectivity only works immediately after application is launched

[Sloop0]

Since installing Altserver, I've consistently had an issue where it won't refresh in the background at all. I've noticed that when I try to manually refresh via my phone, it will return the error message 'Failed to refresh apps' consistently. The only way I've been able to get it to refresh over wifi is by closing any currently running instances of Altserver, launching it again, and immediately performing a refresh. If I try again a few minutes later, it no longer works.

Altserver is allowed in Windows firewall, and I haven't had connectivity issues like this with any other applications that I access via the local network. Any idea what might be going on?

[JJTech0130]

It might have something to do with the Bonjour advertiser falling asleep/inactive… thought I saw an issue about that. Someone wrote a script to restart it iirc?

[Sloop0]

It might have something to do with the Bonjour advertiser falling asleep/inactive… thought I saw an issue about that. Someone wrote a script to restart it iirc?

Thanks for the quick response! Nothing's coming up when I search for "Bonjour" or "script" in the issues. The Bonjour service was already running, but I tried restarting it, and that didn't seem to help.

[JJTech0130]

Ah. Maybe I'm misremembering? I'll look around and see if I can find it.

[JJTech0130]

https://trello.com/c/mx0PzcrT/15-enhancement-altserver-could-not-find-this-device-error-mitigation

[JJTech0130]

@Sloop0 It's apparently not Bonjour itself, it's "Apple Mobile Device Services". Apparently their working on either a daemon to restart it, or bypassing/re-implementing it entirely. See the above trello issue.
There doesn't seem to be a fix, for now.

[Sloop0]

Thanks for the link, but it doesn't look like that's the issue I'm having, or at least it's not the only one. Restarting the "Apple Mobile Device Service" service is causing the phone to temporarily show up in the Windows right-click menu under "Install AltStore", but "Refresh all" via the phone app still doesn't work.

[JJTech0130]

Hum... that's weird. I don't use the Wi-Fi refresh myself, I always use a cable, so I can't really tell you.

[JJTech0130]

The discovery appears to be inherently unreliable, until they implement their new version themselves.
(mDNS/Bonjour isn't very stable -- would be much better if it could cache the IP)