PT will not boot at specific live venue, but does everywhere else!

[audiogamble]

I had the strangest issue the last couple of days. Many will think I'm crazy, so I'll document everything that happened. If anyone else has had a similar experience, or suggests what the problem could have been, I'd love to hear it!

I was hired to do a live recording 2 nights in a row for a band at a venue. When I got to the venue and tried to boot pro tools ultimate 2022.6, the dock icon on my mac would bounce up and down for a couple of minutes followed by nothing. Tried several reboots, different ports for my ilok, unplugged everything except for the ilok - same result. Logic Pro to the rescue!

After night one, I went home with the laptop (M1 macbook air running OS 12.4) and ran some troubleshooting tests. Under the exact same conditions, pro tools boots no problem. No matter what I do, I can't reproduce the problem. No ilok cloud weirdness since I do everything on the physical usb stick. I figure it's just a weird anomaly and I got unlucky that night.

Night 2 rolls around at the venue. I plug everything in and decide to boot up pro tools to see what happens. Lo and behold, the same problem happens again! I do more troubleshooting, and I simply cannot get PT to load up. I also cannot get ilok licence manager to open up either. Same behaviour as night 1 - a bouncing pro tools icon for a minute, and then nothing. Going Logic Pro for night 2 also!

Now here I am today, at my usual studio, doing the same troubleshooting on the same rig I used, and it boots fine! I'm so perplexed by what the issue could have been.

The only thing I can think is that the venue sound tech had to stuff my recording rig in a little closet that had lots of electrical wiring in it. Could there have been some sort of interference that caused my ilok to act weird? Perhaps weird power in the venue? I didn't get any "missing ilok" errors upon opening pro tools, but ilok manager did freeze upon opening. Logic would also hang longer than expected on "scanning plugins". This is leading me to a working theory that my ilok misbehaved on account of some electrical or environmental conditions within the venue itself.

PT works literally perfect today and every other day at different physical locations. And after all this troubleshooting, the only differing variable that comes to mind is the actual physical location of this setup. Has anyone ever encountered something similar?

[Darryl Ramm]

You are either going completely mad, or... this is caused by having a partial internet connection and macOS cannot reach its authentication servers to check the app signing/revocation.

disconnect from all networks, or if the network advertised a dns/route to the Internet make sure it works, or disable the dns/route.

[audiogamble]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

You are either going completely mad, or... this is caused by having a partial internet connection and macOS cannot reach its authentication servers to check the app signing/revocation.

disconnect from all networks, or if the network advertised a dns/route to the Internet make sure it works, or disable the dns/route.

I did test disconnecting from the web. At the venue and at home. Wifi off, no ethernet cables plugged in.

[Darryl Ramm]

It almost certainly will be a network problem, you have something set up where macOS thinks it had a route to Apple servers, a screwed up VPN? some other networking software, somebody has set up networking over Thunderbolt?, something. Maybe you are not disabling WiFi properly. Keep working at it.

ping and netstat -r can help see what is going on.

[bradch00]

If your live site is on the Roger’s network, there is a country wide outage, which has knocked out wireless and internet subscribers across Canada

[audiogamble]

I did explore the possibility of this being network-related. No matter what combinations of network-related troubleshooting, I cannot get this problem to reproduce in any other location except that venue.

I'll note, the only network I was connected to was a standalone network for the x32 rack I was recording with. This network does not connect to the internet. I've tested this exact configuration in other locations and it worked fine with pro tools. Pro tools also did not launch at the venue when disconnecting from that network, and when disconnecting from all networks entirely. If the problem was a thunderbolt network or something like that, I would also be seeing this same problem when I bring the same rig home and configure it identically. This is not the case.

I am aware of what you're suggesting with the mac server thing. I've had this happen to me once, and this prevented all 3rd party apps from running, not just pro tools. When I disconnected from wifi, the problem went away that time.

In this case, it's just pro tools and ilok licence manager that are being affected. Even when I disconnect from wifi, the problem of pro tools not launching persists at the venue, but does not happen outside of the venue.

I've reproduced this exact setup down to the cable, and I cannot for the life of me reproduce what was happening both nights at the gig.

[Darryl Ramm]

Again, it will be the network. Get focused back on that. You need to keep looking.

Get inside the network on your Mac, don't just assume what is going on. Identify what if anything is serving out DHCP addresses, what if anything is configured as a gateway. Look for all network interfaces, both hardware and software. Dig around, look at what network interfaces are listed, what are configured up (use ifconfig.. I have seventeen different network interfaces on my MBP. Only a few show up in the preferences GUI. You likely have more than you assume. Make sure they are marked down if you think you are disconnected.)

And be careful here you are connecting to some network if it is handing out DHCP addresses and default gateway info... the remnants of that can still survive when you then disconnect the interface. And misconfigured DHCP servers handing out info like that is exactly what has caused this problem for other users.

netstat -r shows you the routes, it's most likely route lying saying it can reach apple.com. Mostly likely just a default route, likely coming from a DHCP server. But my MBP has 87 route entries. If I was debugging this on my MBP I'd be manually going though deleting all those.

You can also use little snitch to look at what is going on with the network while the apps are bouncing. You may see macOS trying to reach apple.com address.

If debugging this is too hard, and you have VPN or other networking software installed you might end up doing a clean macOS install, and being super careful not to connect to *any* networks on site.

And if your mac has been enabled in the past to use a smartphone as an internet connection make sure its not failing over to your phone when you disable WiFi.

Again, do this properly, get in with netstat, ifconfig etc. and see what exactly is going on and delete any routes and mark all interfaces down.

[albee1952]

Did you try with the laptop running from the battery(no power connection)? Maybe the venue has a low voltage problem(which can wreak havoc on all things digital)

[daeron80]

Electrical closets can have strong EMF. A DAW in that environment would be a crap shoot.

[Darryl Ramm]

It's not low voltage, it's not EMF, it's not pixies, or witches, or demon spirits, it's not magnets bitches, it's not...

Specific behavior like this is not going to be caused by any of these things. App icons bouncing like this are most commonly caused by macOS Gatekeeper problems... caused by network problems reaching Apple's revocation servers. That's where to focus, and since network problems can be complex troubleshooting this can be difficult, requiring carefully going through what is happening on the Mac/network.