I’m having an issue with using the nvidia sync tool on my Macbook. The error message that is shown by the client is “daemon not running: socket” with a “.socket doesn’t exist” to the DGX spark. I have another Nvidia sync client running perfectly fine on a Ubuntu (linux) workstation, so we are not sure why it’s not working on the Mac client.
The logs show this error below.
{“level”:“error”,“time”:“2025-11-11T16:52:35.858Z”,“source”:“main:libs:api”,“message”:[“Error in API endpoint”,“connectDevice”,{“__syncIpcError”:true,“output”:“{\n "heading": "Unexpected Error",\n "details": "daemon not running: socket /Users/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/s.socket doesn’t exist"\n}\n”,“logPath”:“/Users//Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/nvsync.log”,“header”:“Unexpected Error”,“detail”:“daemon not running: socket /Users//Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/.socket doesn’t exist”,“message”:“Unexpected Error: daemon not running: socket /Users/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/ doesn’t exist”,“name”:“SyncIpcError”}]} {“level”:“error”,“time”:“2025-11-11T16:52:35.862Z”,“source”:“main:window”,“message”:[“connectDevice error:”,{“success”:false,“code”:1,“stderr”:“Failed to connect to device”}]}
Your log shows paths like /Users//Library/... (missing the username) and two variants of the socket name (s.socket vs .socket). That usually means the daemon ran without a proper $HOME (or wrong user context), so it never created the per-user UNIX socket the app expects.
Appologies I actually deleted that manually to remove my username and system’s name from the logs. I’ll substitute here with USERNAME and SPARKHOSTNAME.
{“level”:“error”,“time”:“2025-11-06T17:44:26.532Z”,“source”:“main:libs:api”,“message”:[“Error in API endpoint”,“connectDevice”,{“__syncIpcError”:true,“output”:“{\n "heading": "Unexpected Error",\n "details": "daemon not running: socket /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/<SPARKHOSTNAME>.socket doesn’t exist"\n}\n”,“logPath”:“/Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/nvsync.log”,“header”:“Unexpected Error”,“detail”:“daemon not running: socket /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/<SPARKHOSTNAME>.socket doesn’t exist”,“message”:“Unexpected Error: daemon not running: socket /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/NVIDIA/Sync/session/<SPARKHOSTNAME>.socket doesn’t exist”,“name”:“SyncIpcError”}]}
My laptop is able to resolve the SPARKHOSTNAME properly and I forgot to mention that I can manually SSH to the DGX SPARK just fine from my Macbook.
Thank you so much for the quick response. I have attached a screenshot of what is running on my activity monitor. It looks like the NVIDIA Sync daemons are running properly.
I’ve restarted the nvidia sync app which removes the processes from the activity monitor, restarted my laptop and also did a new install and am still having the same issue.
The only other thing I am wondering about is since this is a managed work laptop, could there be a setting that needs to be enabled in the systems settings > security perhaps?
