Recovering a lost connection using sockets

I'm trying to dig deeper by using this example of an iPhone Chart Server and all is working as expected.

What I wanted to learn next is how to recover when the connection to the server is lost (for whatever reason).

First issue is that the app tries to open the input & output streams concurrently thus if I implement an alert, I get it two times.

The second is that if I'm another view controller and the connection is lost I can't seem to be able to recover it... I call the sendSocketMessage and if there is the error flat to try to use the initNetworkCommunication but I get a fatal error.

@interface ViewController ()

@end

@implementation ViewController

bool connectionError = false;

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];
    // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
    //[self initNetworkCommunication];

    messages = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

}


- (void)initNetworkCommunication {
    CFReadStreamRef readStream;
    CFWriteStreamRef writeStream;
    CFStreamCreatePairWithSocketToHost(NULL, (CFStringRef)@"192.168.1.1", 6035, &readStream, &writeStream);
    inputStream = (__bridge NSInputStream *)readStream;
    outputStream = (__bridge NSOutputStream *)writeStream;

    [inputStream setDelegate:self];
    [outputStream setDelegate:self];

    [inputStream scheduleInRunLoop:[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];
    [outputStream scheduleInRunLoop:[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];

    [inputStream open];
    [outputStream open];

}


- (void)stream:(NSStream *)theStream handleEvent:(NSStreamEvent)streamEvent {

    switch (streamEvent) {

    case NSStreamEventOpenCompleted:
        NSLog(@"Stream opened");
        break;

    case NSStreamEventHasBytesAvailable:

        connectionError = false;
        if (theStream == inputStream) {

        uint8_t buffer[204800];
        int len;

        while ([inputStream hasBytesAvailable]) {
            len = [inputStream read:buffer maxLength:sizeof(buffer)];
            if (len > 0) {

            NSString *output = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:buffer length:len encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

            if (nil != output) {
                //NSLog(@"server said: %@", output);
                //NSLog(@"message received!");

                [self messageReceived:output];
            }
            }
        }
        }
        break;

    case NSStreamEventErrorOccurred:
        NSLog(@"Can not connect to the host!");
        connectionError = true;
        [self connectionLost];
        break;

    case NSStreamEventEndEncountered:
        break;

    default:
        NSLog(@"Unknown event");
    }

}

- (void) connectionLost {

    UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Alert"
                            message:@"Connection to the server lost!"
                           delegate:nil
                      cancelButtonTitle:@"OK"
                      otherButtonTitles:nil];

    [alert show];

}

- (void) messageReceived:(NSString *)message {

    [messages addObject:message];
    //NSLog(@"server said: %@", message);
    //NSLog(@"message received!");

    syncDevices *syncDev = [syncDevices new];
    NSData *data = [message dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

    NSArray *devArr;

    devArr = [syncDev parseDeviceXMLData:data];

    // extra parsing blah blah...

}

- (IBAction)joinChat:(id)sender {

    [self initNetworkCommunication];

    [self sendSocketMessage: @"iam:" message: _inputNameField.text];    
}


- (void) sendSocketMessage:(NSString*) sendCommand message:(NSString*) sendMessage
{
    // do something...

    if (connectionError == true) {
    [self initNetworkCommunication];
    }

    NSString *response  = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@%@", sendCommand, sendMessage];
    NSData *data = [[NSData alloc] initWithData:[response dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]];
    [outputStream write:[data bytes] maxLength:[data length]];
    NSLog(@"clint sent: %@", response);
}



@end

The error I get is from here:

int main(int argc, char * argv[]) {
    @autoreleasepool {
    return UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, NSStringFromClass([AppDelegate class]));
    }
}

Thread 1: EXC_BAD_ACCESS(code=EXC_I386_GPFLT)

Any advice?