For whatever reason today my iPhone and my Sennheiser MM 450 did not want to communicate with each other anymore via Bluetooth. I managed to factory reset my headset, but of course wanted to avoid this on my iPhone. But no chance, no new pairing happened and I could not get rid of the old entry of the headset in my iPhone list.

After a lot of searching and playing around I found two files on the iPhone you have to edit:

Convert the first file into editable XML format:

plutil -convert xml1 /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MobileBluetooth.devices.plist

Here you will find your device’s MAC address (00:16:94:09:AA:AA) which you will need for the second file:

sqlite3 /Library/Keychains/keychain-2.db

Look for your MAC address in the output of the command

select * from genp;

It will look like this:

54||||||||||||||00:16:94:09:AA:AA|MobileBluetooth||h######a;#########9Hx###fd######a####zo####

To remove that line having a 54 in the first column (with name rowid), enter

delete from genp where rowid=54;

and your iPhone will not know how to talk to your headset anymore and ask for re-pairing.

Of course you will need to have a JB iPhone and the packages com.ericasadun.utilities and sqlite3 available via Cydia!

I hope this saves you a reset of your networking settings as it did for me!