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Womp is enabled
Sending the magic packet to the IP does not even "dark wake" the MBP. (I cannot ping it)
Energy settings show "Wake for Wi-Fi network access" which leads me to believe that my Ethernet dongle does not support WOL, even though the manufacturer assured me that it does. I have tried several different ones and none of them so far have shown the text "Wake for network access" instead.
I've been working on this for weeks with no success at all. No issue whatsoever waking up any Windows machines. Very frustrating!
However, I cannot ping the Ethernet IP address.
I may be wrong but it seems pretty normal because when the Mac is asleep the USB ports are not powered anymore.
I've been working on this for weeks with no success at all. No issue whatsoever waking up any Windows machines. Very frustrating!
I agree, I've been tinkering with this in the past as well, to find pretty much no answer.
Granted, using WOL to wake up a laptop may seem uncommon, but hey, it should work.
However, I'd love to find a solution for this ...
USB ports are not powered anymore
I suspect this is indeed the issue, which may make some kind of sense for a laptop.
Strange enough though, my Mac Pro (I know, not a laptop) USB would power down during sleep, but since 11.2.1 it no longer powers down USB ports (my RGB keyboard stays on).
Sending the magic packet to the IP does not even "dark wake" the MBP. (I cannot ping it)
When I try to do this with just Ethernet, it fails on my MBP as well.
Do you see the same when doing WOL/Ping to the WiFi connection?
What model/year do you have?
Mine is a 2016 15" MacBook Pro.
I read somewhere that only as of a certain generation, WiFi modules can receive WOL..
Not sure if it affects anything, but do you have Powernap enabled?
I seem to like a good challenge haha ... so I did some more searching and tests.
The following info I found, which may work for you, but did not make a difference for me;
sudo fdesetup authrestart" (skips initial authentication for FileVault)I wouldn't be too thrilled to do either, and when I tested this, it simply didn't make a different.
I additionally wrote a small program that gets alerted by macOS when the Mac comes out of sleep.
This doesn't work either as it will not get "the message" from macOS until the screen is on again.
Sending the magic packet to the IP does not even "dark wake" the MBP. (I cannot ping it)
Forgot to ask: are you sending the magic packet and the ping to the WiFi IP address or the Ethernet IP address?
I'm pretty sure we can forget about the USB dongle to work.
Wifi however stays connected (on my 2016 MBP) even when the MBP sleeps.
Ethernet totally disappears (as expected as USB is powered down).
I'll try the WiFi wakeup and see what happens.
Ok, that works. So the workaround is to wake the computer via WiFi, then connect to it via Wired for speed.
Crazy, but it works...
wake the computer via WiFi
Yep, that is what I have found to work ... screen still doesn't go on, but you could trigger that with caffeniate through SSH.
And I agree: crazy ... 😜
Things get even crazier ... haha.
You do not even need WOL. Just send the SSH statement straight to the WiFi IP address and not only does your Mac wake up, but the screen turns on as well. You'd need SSH login without a password (see my article "SSH Login without a Password" on how to do this securely).
I've added the caffeinate example there as well.
In short: enable (secure) SSH login on your MacBook, and send this (no WOL needed):
ssh user@server "caffeinate -u -t 1 || exit 1;"
This wakes up my MacBook Pro, and turns on the screen.
I just released a new version of miniWOL, which allows running a script after sending a WOL.
So a little script like the one I mentioned can then be executed after sending a WOL signal, allowing you to wake up the screen of your MacBook Pro.
Apple could have made this much easier on all of us - that's for sure 😉
@Hans, I found this thread extremely helpful and signed up just to thank you.
I was able to enable remote login on my Mac, set up some port forwarding rules in my router and use ssh with private key authentication to wake up my Mac Mini from my Windows PC. I put the ssh command in a PowerShell script and created a Windows shortcut (with a good looking Apple icon) so I can send the "wake" command with a single click.
Bedankt!
@davidh -- Nice! Thank you for taking the time to post a thank you, and awesome to hear this was useful for you! 👍 😊
@Hans: Thank you very much for your solution. No need to send a magic packet; just execute that caffeinate command via ssh. That's awesome.
I've spent so much time to find a solution. It seems very strange to me that seemingly just a handful people cares about that issue. Is it really that uncommon to use remote desktop software? I'm so glad that I found this thread.
@derkallevombau Awesome - great to hear this was helpful!
Took me quite a bit of searching and testing as well. Good to hear it has been of use!
Maybe folks more focus on remote access with Windows (I would assume, mostly Terminal Server or Hyper-V) and not so much macOS?
I honestly have no clue why and if this is considered uncommon for macOS.
For me personally, I'd say most remote machines I use are either Windows or Linux based, and quite often headless.