The Pain of a Password-Protected Screen Saver

July 30, 2006 - 10:16am

Graeme asks:

Question

Hi guys

I’ve googled and found little help so far…

if a password is required to wake from sleep/screensaver, is it possible to wake a mac from sleep (at say 0200) in order to run a backup script ?

what’s happening at the moment is that the computer wakes, the script starts to run, but then after about 1 minute, because the authentication dialog is not processed, it goes back to sleep, so interrupting the script

i had the same problem trying to sftp into a mac after using wake-on-lan to wake it from sleep remotely. i can successfully make the sftp connection and start file transfers, however it quickly goes back to sleep (as the authentication dialog is unanswered)

so is there a way to keep the security of require-password-from-sleep, as well as allowing useful things like running scheduled backup scripts ?

thanks

Answer

In short, no. It’s going to sleep it again if the password’s not entered. Just the way it works.

Of course, that means that if you want the Wake-On-LAN feature to work without sleeping it, you need to log out of the computer. However, if you want the scheduled auto-wake to work, you have to be logged in without a password-protected screen saver for it to work.

Choose wisely.

The reason for this is a stupid Apple bug that’s been around forever that the engineers refuse to fix that requires you to be logged in for the scheduled power events to work. If you’re at the login window, no scheduled events will trigger.

However, if you script a WOL event from another machine while at the login window, it should wake up just fine, so if you can do everything you want over SSH, then you’re golden. Just log out and do the stuff you need from another machine.

I highly recommend affected people get an ADC account and file a bug on this so that Apple knows just how many people are affected. Highly.

About Adam Knight

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Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Photonic) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

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July 30, 2006 - 1:32pm

zarquon said

Why not just have the password, and let the computer go to screen saver, but not sleep? You still have the password protection, and you can set it to sleep the display. It’s not quite as energy conscious, but it solves your problem.

July 30, 2006 - 5:11pm

MacLemon said

There actually is a simple solution to this problem. Don’t use the password protected screensaver, but use fast user switching instead! When you’re done with your work, fast-logout your user and set your Mac to sleep. It should wake up at the time specified in Energy Saver but the Login Window will prevent it from going back to sleep again.
MacLemon

July 31, 2006 - 3:46am

g_smith said

thanks – this actually works

it’s still a little inelegant and not intuitive, so i’ve taken Adam’s advice and filed a bug report with Apple; for now, however, i’ll use fast-switching to the login window to sleep

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