Then I connected my iPhone and commenced the iOS 5 update. The backup and update seemed to go fine. Then it tried to restore from the backup it had just taken (from the iCloud servers by the looks as my internet connection started downloading at full speed), after 12 minutes or so of 1mbps downloading the download stopped and it continued with the restore, but after a while bombed with the following error:

An error occurred while restoring this iPhone (-35).

Drat. So I found Apple’s reference to the positive 35 error code on http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3694#error35 (no mention of a negative 35 error code though) which suggested replacing the cable with a known good one. I tried that, and iTunes popped up saying that it was interrupted while restoring, and would I like to continue, or delete the backup:

iTunes was interrupted while restoring the contents of the iPhone “Spunky2″. Would you like to restore this iPhone again now?
[Cancel] [Delete Backup] [Continue Restore]

I clicked continue. Then I got:

An error occurred while restoring this iPhone (-34).

This error is apparently about security issues (permissions?) if it’s true that the minus / plus sign in front of the error number is irrelevant. From Apple’s support page:

Error 20, 21, 34, 37: These errors typically occur when security software interferes with the restore and update process. If you are using a PC, follow this article to resolve this issue.

Security software. The only ’security software’ I have on here that I can fathom may have something to do with this is the virus scanner ClamXAV but this is not configured to do anything automatically and is just so I can scan files I am suspicious of. Perhaps there is a permissions issue. Perhaps it doesn’t like something about my iTunes library structure. Who knows. There’s nothing helpful logged that I can see in Console.

Well anyway I tried unplugging it and plugging it in again and getting it to retry the restore, but it keeps throwing up error -34 immediately. So then I clicked OK to the error and went into iTunes and clicked the Done button on the setup iPhone page, and now it’s sync’ing all my apps to the iPhone. Perhaps this will achieve the desired result. If not I’ll again try to do a full restore to factory settings and restore from backup and see how that goes.

Update It seems to be restoring correctly now. I shut down the iPhone and my Mac and left them that way (in disgrace) overnight. This morning I powered them on, did the Restore again, again selecting a backup taken a few hours before the upgrade, and it’s gone through with no errors. It restored the configuration, rebooted, and now it’s sync’ing all my music, apps etc. Looking much healthier.

Have you tried turning it off and on?

Afterthoughts My ADSL connection became unstable later in the evening, and it’s possible it dropped out while trying to do the initial restore, or during some other crucial just-have-to-check-something-with-apple’s-servers type operation. I wonder how people are going to go with slower or more unreliable internet connections. I guess those folks will have to find someone with a good setup (mac with high speed, high reliability internet connection) in order to feed and water (eg backup, upgrade) their iThings. Of course this is based entirely upon conjecture.

I have an Intel Mac Mini which I’m trying to get a software PBX onto. Given that OpenPBX.org won’t run nicely on it, I thought I’d try getting Linux installed on it, but I’ve had lots of problems with this as well. I tried the mactel-linux instructions for it, but I get to the end and try booting linux and it says “Missing operating system”. I’m now trying about six other linux distros to see if they are any better.

I’m also going to try both Asterisk and OpenPBX.org on Linux on Parallels on Mac OS X, just for the hell of it. Probably it’ll result in chopped up audio or something but we’ll see how we go. To this end I have installed trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home) version 2.0 under Parallels, which is a custom-built version of CentOS with Asterisk, MySQL, FreePBX etc. I’ll post the Parallels disk image of this up here shortly.