Fixing Mavericks's Outdated HTTPS

[maverick28]

Forget about FaceTime on 10.9. I just googled - many people have been having that for ages. Even if officially supported as a minimal requirement, there's no guarantee it'll function properly: there's a strange coincidence that every 3 or 4 years, in the fall, when Apple releases the new OS/iOS iteration the compatibility between older and newer tiers of "officially supported" individual (per device and version) features breaks irreversibly. They're forcing you to upgrade in defiance of their own support documents: if FT was 'temporarily' out then it would be so in every version, but in Mojave it works since the combo macOS 10.14/iOS 13-14 is still legit in their view - for now. Just wait until they roll out iOS 17 - that will break too, even if by that time the minimal requirement will be 10.14, because "the minimal requirement" is double-speak for "unsupported and incompatible - so screw you". That's the reality.
If something was be on my end, or with the zonal connectivity in my region, then every IM/VoIP service would be broken down but that's not the case and no proxy is going to save the day.

Here's what connections FaceTime makes when a FT call initiated:

It's either "listening" or opening IPv6 ports I have zero understanding of their purpose and role, apart from the fact that the second port changes every time the new session is started.

 

[otetzone]

Oh well. Guess I'll just live with that. And the iTunes store at least is displaying things.
Did you ever launched Chromium on Mavericks? I looked it up but it doesn't seem get to work with proxy enabled. With disabled it's okay. Could only find two flags related to proxy about Data Server. Which seems irrelevant in this case. And Open Proxy Settings in Chromium settings sends you right to your network configuration settings.

Anyway, there's a High Sierra Macbook. But I want this one would stay alive on Mavericks as long as possible.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Did you ever launched Chromium on Mavericks?

No, I really try to avoid using outdated browsers for security reasons. Have you looked for a way to add the Squid root certificate to Chrome?

 

[maverick28]

Did you ever launched Chromium on Mavericks?

Chromium or Chrome? I had it installed until the summer of the past year when I discovered that Firefox better suits my needs and is way more customizable: I instinctively dislike and avoid Google where possible, and FF Quantum has resurrected my faith in FF. I also run FF Legacy on 10.7 which flies and lets me sync my stuff across 3 macOSes. Chrome dropped support for Mav. in the summer of 2018 but was pretty formidable, powerful, fast and up-to-date because of its monopoly: I believe it would do even today since it encompasses top-notch tech and is the edge of the web-development, but if FF still supports Mavericks I prefer using it. Both of them don't need proxying because of the reliance on their own engines rather than WebKit.

 

[maverick28]

I think I found the cause of failing FaceTime calls. It's either a bug or bad software design, but it's definitely a flaw, at least in Mavericks and looks like they fixed that in newer versions which means for those who run 10.9 there's no hope other than learning its behaviouristic pattern. The entry in Console I mentioned several posts earlier which was "Unable to create the power assertion" actually means what it means: in iOS, over the course of the years, congenial and inventive Apple engineers introduced a number of "disturbance" controlling features, overlapping, confusing and getting in the way of each other and the user: "Do Not Disturb", "Silence repeated calls from the same person", "Silence calls when the screen is locked". When the iOS device goes into sleep mode its screen locks automatically after some unknown but predetermined amount of time: once again, in the year of 2013 caring, mild-hearted Apple software engineers decided that there simply can't arise a situation when a call must be allowed regardless of the state of the device. If you go to the Settings-->Do Not Disturb-->Silence you'll see that they left only 2 (two!) options to choose from: "Always" and "When the screen is locked". And that's it. No "Never". It can be assumed with a high degree of probability that with such settings most of the people would have their devices sleep most of the time. However, that shouldn't be an obstacle for any incoming call be it a cell or VoIP network and it really isn't with anyone but Apple: that's why, under normal circumstances, you receive SMS and cell network as well as Viber, Skype, Whatsapp calls timely and no device can "silence" them even in sleep mode. However, as of 2013, Apple, as always, thought differently, but thankfully changed their mind since then, so there's hope.

Apparently, when FT from a Mavericks machine tries to reach its mobile counterpart it simply can't because it's unable to "create the power assertion" - something like the caffeinate or pmset command utilities do on the desktop when you control power management: caffeinate creates power assertions for processes based on what parameters you supply (and ironically, caffeinate first appeared... in Mavericks). With it, you can tell the Mac to come out of sleep, turn on/off the display, system or disk at any designated time - "create a power assertion". In the case of FaceTime, your Mavericks machine should be capable of performing the same action but it isn't. If you unlock your iPhone and immediately call then the call reaches it which kind of defeats the purpose of this and any service.

 

[otetzone]

Chromium or Chrome?

Chromium. Ungoogled. Sometimes it works with certain websites better than FF, I don't have the slightest idea for what reason. I keep it as a backup browser to FF when it fails and try to use Safari as little as possible.

Talking about FT, I received a voice call on my laptop last night, tried to answer it but the connection just didn't come through. Then I called this person from my other devices (iOS 10.3, High Sierra), tried both audio and video and nonetheless, my call never reached the person. So strange.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Would you guys mind moving the Facetime discussion to another thread? This one sends me email notifications in case people need help with the proxy.

I am still very interested to see what you can find out!

 

[maverick28]

Really, there's nothing more to find out, I believe it is the ultimate culprit. I posted this as a candidate to the definitive explanation of why any manipulations with domains inside the configuration file were doomed from the very beginning: it's not about networking, it's about the software itself, in this case - waking a target device by doing a call. The implementation is flawed in Mavericks.

 

[maverick28]

Xcode 4 on Lion succeeds authenticating me when establishing the connection with GitHub repositories (and I see the list of those in Organizer) but fails to clone them onto my Mac with a TLS protocol error:

error: error:1407742E:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:tlsv1 alert protocol version while accessing https://scrutinizer11@github.com/scrutinizer11/mozilla-keychain.git/info/refs
fatal: HTTP request failed

Safari 5 loads the site's title page ungracefully and without warnings about an unsupported browser but the authentication fields aren't clickable, BTW.
Access.log shows connections made to the relevant github URLs but doesn't register Xcode's attempts to clone that, by common logic, should involve it contacting GitHub's servers (nothing shows up in access.log when I try to clone repos). No ways to make it connect with TLSv2 or later and GitHub uses only the most modern implementations of HTTPS available.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

? Can't say I'm sure what's going on there. I haven't used Lion since it was current. I know for sure that git clone goes through the proxy on Mavericks (which ofc natively supports TLSv2, but lacks cipher suites for certain providers).

Let me know if you find anything. Or if you notice anything similar-ish happening on Mavericks, which would be a higher priority to fix.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Please move any further discussion to the new thread in the "Early Intel Macs" subforum. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fixing-https-issues-on-old-versions-of-os-x.2281326/