An iDiot's Guide To iMessage

[jb11381]

After upgrading to Catalina, I lost iMessages. I went through this procedure several times but failed every time. Today I figured as a last resort I'd call Apple. Worst case, my Apple ID gets banned and I create a new one. Well, they fixed it for me and I've got Facetime and iMessages working again Now, any suggestions for AirPlay?

 

[jkbuha]

I don't know what's going on at apple but something is. I've had a working serial and setup for many years. i've had no changes on my end and imessagedebug still shows all valies good to go, but out of blue yesterday they blacklisted serial.

I confirmed it was serial they blacklisted because I generated a new valid format one that's not used by apple and restored imessage. but then 24 hours later, they blacklisted the new serial. I've verified everything is perfect to the T. Hardware NVram good, imessagedebug sound and identical between reboots, updates, etc. eithernet good, date and time good, app store and itunes good. imessage and facetime fail to authenticate on hack (work fine from ipad, iphone so not imessage account either)

The original serial I was using had been hard whitelisted by apple years ago, well until yesterday when they suddenly blacklisted it out of blue. a serial that was never used by anyone else. the new one I generated i hadn't had to call to whitelist it yet so that's my next step I suppose but it doesn't explain why the one that had already been whitelisted was suddenly blacklisted yesterday

EDIT, it occured to me someone might have matched my uuid or generated the serial I had used the last few years. the UUid was unique to my board, but that doesn't mean someone didn't generate it. serial, was a generated one from a 2008 mac pro, maybe people stll generate those? In any case, I decided to go all out with clean everything, new rom (changed from mac address 1 to mac address 2), new UUid, new serial. imessage is again working, and i cleaned the old macs off icloud account to keep number small. will see if apple blacklists, if they do I'll call support and explain that my motherboard fried and needed replacing.

Same thing happened to me yesterday. Whitelisted serial, worked solidly for the last 3 years went black yesterday. Tried generating a new serial, board and UUID - worked for 24 hours then went blacklisted.

Keen to understand what's the best way forward here. Am reticent to call and whitelist for the same thing to happen again, especially if it may be due to something else...

 

[MysticalOS]

What worked for me, so far, is the new generated rom. the new serial has worked since that post. obviously I didn't use same UUID etc as everything else. but the first serial I generated that only last 24 hours, I didn't change the rom (which is normally calculated using ethernet address 1). since my computer has two ethernet ports, I switched to using ethernet address 2 instead of 1. you don't want a single stat from old imessage debug in the new one. everything new but still try to be unique.

of course knowing my luck I'll be back here soon enough with more problems. but i'm hoping that over a week is a good sign. whatever was trigger the automatic bans I corrected (which as I suspect they had blacklisted not just my serial of several years, but every identifying number, so when I made first new serial, I had changed everything but ROM value (that was still ethernet 1) and my second attempt made sure I changed that too (and everything I had used with first regenerate attempt)

 

[jkbuha]

Seems to have worked this end as well, at least for longer than 24 hours - which is already a start.

Thanks to your tip, I realised that CLOVER was incorrectly generating the UseMacAddr0 and UseMacAddr1 fields in RTVariables (resulting mac address was 0000...). Regenerating everything and substituting ROM for real value seems to have done the trick. On this test alone, it would seem that Apple recently changed its imessage authentication to look more specifically at the ROM (or mac address) field for validation.

Will report back soon. A week is a long time in imessage authentication...

 

[jkbuha]

7 days later, it seems to have done the trick.

For anyone experiencing similar problems, check your ROM field. And, in my case at least, UseMacAddrX didn't work, and just produced a field of zeros.

 

[onoakino]

Hi jkbuha! Can you elaborate on what you mean by "substituting ROM for real value"? I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by "real value". Did you mean the en0's (in my case, the built-in ethernet's) MAC address which I can get via ifconfig? Did you put the actual ethernet MAC address as a string value for the ROM field in RTVariables section of the config.plist?

 

[Feartech]

Hi jkbuha! Can you elaborate on what you mean by "substituting ROM for real value"? I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by "real value". Did you mean the en0's (in my case, the built-in ethernet's) MAC address which I can get via ifconfig? Did you put the actual ethernet MAC address as a string value for the ROM field in RTVariables section of the config.plist?

for example, a real value would be something like:

EB-8A-9C-2A-0C-B6

but would be added without the -'s:
EB8A9C2A0CB6

 

[onoakino]

Thank you for the quick response, feartech. I replaced 'UseMACAddress0' and use my laptop ethernet port's MAC address as the ROM value in RtVariables section of my config.plist. I used xcode editor to be extra sure I did it correctly. Saved. Rebooted. Tried to set-up iMessage again but still got the same error as when I was using UseMACAddress0.

 

[Feartech]

Thank you for the quick response, feartech. I replaced 'UseMACAddress0' and use my laptop ethernet port's MAC address as the ROM value in RtVariables section of my config.plist. I used xcode editor to be extra sure I did it correctly. Saved. Rebooted. Tried to set-up iMessage again but still got the same error as when I was using UseMACAddress0.

iMessage can be a pain to setup, maybe start again from post 1. also you could look into a mac address generator....

 

[onoakino]

I very much agree that setting it up is a real PITA. I envy those who got to make iMessage work out of the box, or those who at least by following the guide to a tee, got it to work on their first few tries. I've been trying since 2018. I was still on Sierra then. Tried to make it work again now on Mojave, and still no go. Everytime I failed setting up iMessage, I console myself from the fact that there are better messaging apps that are available out there that are miles better than iMessage in terms of functionality and features. But I keep trying to activate iMessage because it is the only area of hackintoshing that I was not able to conquer yet. Been hackintoshing since 2012. The only thing I was not able to do was to actually call apple support.

Thank you once again for your responses, feartech. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow. This covid19 lockdown has given me so much time in my hands I might give it a go one more time.

Keep safe!