Mac OSX and Power Management: What do you do?

Deadline
1

We’ve got 8 video editors running Mac Pro 7,1s and a whole team of artists on iMacs and iMac Pros, plus a couple of Mac Minis. Lots of untapped rendering power there that I’m getting going.

The problem I am running into is power management.

From all my research, WOL doesn’t really work on OSX and hasn’t been supported for years.

Getting a reliable answer on this is tough. Some say you have to disable dark wake, though this doesn’t appear to work anymore, is ignored, or can’t really be disabled anymore.

Some claim it only works with a router running Bonjour, which doesn’t really work since those are just for home networking, not enterprise.

Even more claim that WOL won’t work from a true power off state, only from various sleep modes.

I can remotely command a machine to sleep with “pmset sleepnow” but WOL won’t wake it up again.

I’ve got a few Windows-based workers that don’t have WOL support, including a few older Mac Pros (1,1 to 5,1). My work-around for these machines is to create a separate power management group and have them go to Suspend mode (Windows-only).

So what do others do when Mac-based workers?

Is there any solution other than just run our Macs 24/7?

2

I don’t have a Mac to test with so I can only come at this from the Deadline side of things. If the script described here works as advertised then it could be called instead of the usual wake-on-lan feature for your Mac group.

Something like this:

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In this example, the wakeonlan script is installed on the machine running Pulse in the home folder. (Details on tokens that can be used in Power Management here)

The issue is that the above script seems to be just crafting and sending the magic packet for us, so if every other method of WOL fails I’d not expect it to work. Hopefully there’s some magic in that script I’m failing to see but I’m not convinced given the other research you’ve clearly done. Ideally it’s as easy as enabling the ‘Wake for network access’ option. :slight_smile:

If there’s alternate ways of waking machines (RDP, SSH, some other 3 letter system) that ‘Run Command’ option could be leveraged.