Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on
Mon Sep 28, 2015 2:17 pm
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Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

We've finished preliminary testing with Indigo 6.1.4 on the GM candidate of El Capitan. On a MacBook, everything seems to run correctly. The Insteon PowerLinc seems to work well as do both the Z-Stick Series 2 and Gen5. We haven't tested any other Z-Wave interfaces since they aren't officially supported, so YMMV.

We do, however, have some other news: on a Mac Pro (early 2009), things are decidedly not going well.

Our testing shows some extremely bad behavior on the Mac Pro. If you plug a Z-Stick Series 2 (not the new one) directly into any of the USB ports on the Mac Pro, the Z-Wave interface will hang up very badly - in fact, it will hang up such that the Indigo Server will not restart without rebooting your Mac. In an interesting turn of events, we plugged the Z-Stick into a Dynex USB hub, and it works correctly. This of course goes against the conventional wisdom that you should plug interfaces directly into the USB ports on the Mac. We believe it might have to do with how the Mac Pro tries to detect USB 1 vs USB 2 devices, but that's just a guess.

Another problem we experienced on the Mac Pro is that the PowerLinc would, every couple of days or so, appear twice on the Mac Pro's USB bus (as shown in the System Information app). When this happens, communication will never work and a reboot is also required. These two problems together seem to indicate that El Capitan has some issues with USB on Mac Pros (at the very least), and we highly recommend you avoid upgrading if that's what Indigo is running on for you.

One final problem we found on the Mac Pro, which is completely unrelated to Indigo, is that multiple video cards (to drive multiple monitors) causes El Capitan to periodically (about every 5 minutes or so) crash out of the Finder back to the login screen. After reporting this bug to Apple, it was marked as a duplicate of another bug, so clearly this is something others are seeing as well. Unless Apple fixes this, then if you have multiple video cards in an older Mac Pro, you will likely need to remove all but one to get the thing stable enough to use.

As always, we highly recommend that anyone with the option wait on the upgrade until at least the first bug fix release has dropped (10.11.1). I personally, being the one with the Mac Pro and all of the bad experiences, would wait for several bug fix releases before upgrading. Again, do so at your own risk and YMMV.

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Posted on
Fri Oct 02, 2015 9:12 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

There appears to be an OS bug around adding the Python process (which runs the Indigo web server) to the Firewall exclusion list. Our testing shows that despite adding the appropriate exclusion, the OS is still prompting to allow connections whenever the Indigo Server is restarted. That includes when you restart your Mac and you have the server set to auto launch - you will eventually (it takes a while) get prompted with the standard firewall Allow/Deny prompt after a reboot.

Note: this is only the Python process that runs the web server and handles all Indigo Touch and RESTful API communication. The exclusion to the actual Indigo Server works correctly.

Until we can figure out what's going on, we recommend avoiding upgrading to El Capitan. If you already have, then you can either disable the firewall or just be careful that any time you restart the Indigo Server you click the allow button when prompted by the OS.

We'll post an update when we have more information.

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Posted on
Thu Oct 22, 2015 11:39 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Our testing on 10.11 and Airfoil 4.9.1 has revealed what I believe is a bug in Airfoil around application audio sources, and more specifically, the speech synthesis background app. I've contacted them so we'll see what happens. It manifests itself as a repeated error message in the Event Log every second or two. If you are using Airfoil and Indigo, I recommend that you not upgrade to 10.11 until we can work out what's going on.

[EDIT] apparently there were some temporary glitches after installing Airfoil 4.9.1. A reboot seems to have resolved the issues we've seen.

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Posted on
Mon Oct 26, 2015 9:27 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

I filed a bug with Apple about the multiple monitor/video card problem. It was closed as a duplicate of another bug (which is open), so they are aware of the problem.

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Posted on
Mon Oct 26, 2015 9:28 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

I filed a bug about the PowerLinc issue and they asked for some more information, which I provided. Nothing further on that one.

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Posted on
Tue Oct 27, 2015 8:59 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

None of these issues seem to be resolved in 10.11.1. So again, our recommendation is to wait to upgrade if at all possible.

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Posted on
Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:42 am
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Update on 10.11.2 - the PowerLinc issue described above seems to have been resolved. I've been running the PowerLinc for 4 days and it's still working, so that seems to be good news. OTOH, the Z-Wave issue still appears to be a problem if it's plugged directly into a USB port on my Mac - it continues to work if it's plugged into a hub.

The multiple display bug (which really has nothing to do with Indigo) that I filed with Apple has been marked as closed but I have yet to confirm that it's fixed.

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Posted on
Thu Dec 17, 2015 5:08 pm
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

jay (support) wrote:
Update on 10.11.2 - the PowerLinc issue described above seems to have been resolved. I've been running the PowerLinc for 4 days and it's still working, so that seems to be good news.


I spoke too soon. A little over a week and it happened again, so 10.11.2 may have helped a bit, but the bug is still there.

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Posted on
Mon Jan 04, 2016 4:11 pm
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Re: Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Forum user katiaf found that the python firewall issue can be fixed (it's definitely an OS issue). Thanks for the info katiaf!

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