Hi Ronni An update on progress towards fixing problem of Apple TV not waking iMac. Results promising, but - - -
1. I applied your explanation about Spotlight and removed my weekly OS X backup Firewire drive from Spotlight (retained Time Machine). This reduced the number (and time taken) of network activities around 'mdworker'. Mac now appeared to enter sleep mode with little or no network activity (which previously appeared to be due to Spotlight activity). 2. With an SMC Reset and standard settings - no improvement: ATV not waking iMac on 1 out of 1 test with Mac in "deep sleep" and no network activity indicated. 3. Applied your suggestion: "Do you have "Put hard disks to sleep when possible' selected in System Preferences > Energy Saver? If so try disabling this setting and see if it makes any difference." It DID make a difference, but not a cure - ATV woke iMac on 5 out of 6 tests. May be the solution to waking the Mac from "deep sleep". 4. Part way through test (with 3/3 OK) I applied another suggestion: "I would suggest you 'Boot from Recovery Partition', then 'Repair Drive' and then 'Repair Permissions' and then Reboot as normal." Results were both OK (no Permissions to repair as this procedure was run a few days ago.) Then ran ATV tests with 2/2 successful wakes from Mac in "deep sleep". 5. Then set Energy Saver parameters to 15 minutes (instead of 25 mins) to try and get Mac to be in sleep mode while Spotlight mdworker etc was still active. With screen black but with router still indicating some network activity, ATV failed to Wake Mac. (Sigh.) Failure indicated on TV screen with usual message "iTunes libraries that have Home Sharing turned on using "[ID]" will appear in Computers." Failure indicated on iMac from Console log was absence of a "wake reason: GIGE" entry at expected time. ATV connected to iTunes as usual when the Mac was activated without further action on ATV by me. 6. Setting 'Energy Saver' prefs to disabling "put hard disks to sleep when possible" has shown up other peculiar Mac responses. (a) Safari now quits (Dock activity light off) from time to time. (b) Now get an occasional unexplained "wake reason: GIGE" in the very early morning. (May have always been attempted by the network but not previously "got through?" iTunes App update available advice perhaps?) (c) Two WD My Book Studio Firewire drives now appear to go to idle mode after 10 minutes; Two Seagate GoFlex Firewire drives remain active all all times and LEDs only go off when Mac is asleep. The external drives themselves are not spinning. The internal drive continues to spin, as expected, until the Mac is asleep. 7. I will now conduct more tests with a focus on times when the Mac is in "light sleep". Thanks for your guidance and suggestions. Does no-one else from WAMUG have this issue? Cheers Alan On 09/10/2012, at 12:51 PM, Alan Smith <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Ronni Delay in responding due to Mail not accepting new messages while I spent an hour or so composing a reply to another email! Then the backlog arrived all at once. My conclusions yesterday about localising the problem with Apple TV not waking the iMac were not correct: more variables and tests just confirm that ATV does not wake the iMac intermittently. It will wake iMAC with a "wake for network access" cue sometimes. Late this morning I did an SMC reset to give me a clean base to start with. I will follow your suggestions after I have a few hours of testing with this clean base. Other responses with your comments below - Cheers Alan On 09/10/2012, at 9:29 AM, Ronni Brown <[email protected]> wrote: On 08/10/2012, at 12:18 PM, Alan Smith <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Alan, You have never explained to me what you meant by this comment you made. >>> Came to unconfirmed conclusion that my basic model iMac (no graphics card?) What do you mean "No Graphics card"? Your iMac should have a Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 9400M or ATI Radeon HD 4670 A. My error: the context was that my base option 21.5" iMac does not work as well with graphics as the top option 27" late 2009 iMac, even with RAM increased to 12GB. I have the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory. Extending main memory didn't improve performance. > Oddity No 1: Console log messages show a lot of mdworker, lsboxd and sandbox > events every few minutes while Mac is sleeping OR awake (but quiet). > ("mdworker unable to talk to lsboxd" is typical.) Forums suggest this may > be normal for OS X 10.8 and is to do with Spotlight. Doesn't sound quite > right to me, but then … That is correct. mdworker is part of Spotlight, which is basically a search engine for your Mac (think Google but locally, for your own files). "mdworker is short for ‘metadata server worker’. mdworker is basically the core technology behind Mac OS X’s awesome search engine Spotlight, it spiders meta data from your Mac and its files and creates a readable index so that you can find things practically instantaneously via Spotlight (command-spacebar)." lsboxd is short for 'launch services sandbox daemon' A. Thanks for detailing this. Never noticed such activity with Snow Leopard, but it was morbid curiosity to follow up while trying to find Console log patterns affecting 'Wake on Demand'. Just guessing - would Spotlight have such a lot of activity because it is searching 4 permanently attached Firewire hard drives as well as the internal HD? I would suggest you 'Boot from Recovery Partition', then 'Repair Drive' and then 'Repair Permissions' and then Reboot as normal. A. I applied 'Repair Drive' and then 'Repair Permissions' after a Restart on Sunday, from the normal disk utility access. (No problems detected, but no improvement to Apple TV.) I will re-do this later using the Mountain Lion Recovery HD as per your steps below. To Boot into the Lion Recovery HD' 1. Hold down either the 'Option key' on your Mac while the Mac is starting up. 2. When you see the 'Startup Manager', let go the Option key and click the Up-Arrow button below the Recovery HD icon. 3 Open Disk Utility 4. 'Repair Disk' and then 'Repair Disk Permissions > Oddity No 2: With iMac sleeping, sometimes the Belkin LEDs are not flashing > - just the WiFi LED flicks about every 90 seconds. There are NO "mdworker" > log entries in Console during this state. I confirm that Apple TV does not > wake Mac in this state. Well, there is nothing happening on the Network, so the LED lights won't be flashing. The Wi-Fi LED will flash when a wireless device iPhone/iPad is on the Network. A. (1) Yes, it is the iPad that causes the 90 second heartbeat. BUT (2) - Apple TV did wake Mac this morning with no prior network activity, and displayed a clear Console log entry of "wake reason: GIGE (Network)" which I think is the desired action. Your Apple TV is not waking your iMac in 'Wake On Lan' .... Do you have "Put hard disks to sleep when possible' selected in System Preferences > Energy Saver? If so try disabling this setting and see if it makes any difference. A. Put hard disks to sleep is selected. I will unselect and test. Even try disabling 'Wake for network access'... as the iMac is not waking with this enabled. A. iMac DID wake for network access from Apple TV early this morning. But, yes, this is another variable. Note also that the iMac WiFi is turned "off" as the ATV is connected via Ethernet, and that forums have suggested leaving WiFi "on" is a possible cure. <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3774> Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Quad-Core i7 “Thunderbolt" 2.3GHz / 8GB / 750GB @ 7200rpm HD OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.wamug.org.au/pipermail/wamug.org.au-wamug/attachments/20121009/2d2782c5/attachment.htm -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.wamug.org.au/pipermail/wamug.org.au-wamug/attachments/20121009/73a82d1f/attachment.htm -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug> -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>
