Sleep not working correctly

Hi Sean,

Try trashing com.apple.PowerManagement.plist in '/Library/Preferences/System Configuration/' and restarting your mac.

Yang

Hi, Sean.

You wrote:

"HP: PhotoSmart Printer Drivers"

While there are many potential causes of problems with idle sleep, your mention of the HP Photosmart printer brings several things to mind:

1. What version of the HP Photosmart printer drivers are you using? See "Mac OS X 10.3: Using an HP Photosmart Printer."

2. I've seen problems with idle sleep caused by a particular component of HP printer software, usually reported by folks using HP's All-in-One printers. You can check for this as follows:

If your HP printer software is the cause of this issue, it constantly writes the message

<code style="background:#F0F8FF">SCSIAction: unimplemented</code>

to the Console. This prevents idle sleep. The message, and hence the sleep problem, is caused by HP Scanjet Manager. To remove it:

(1) Open System Preferences > Accounts > your_account > Startup Items
(2) Select "HP Scanjet Manager" in the list of Startup Items.
(3) Click the [-] (Remove) button below the list to delete this item.
(4) Quit System Preferences.
(3) Restart your Mac.

3. HP Photosmart printers appear to have caused at least three issues with Panther. See these KB articles. While none of these are sleep-related, these may also be of interest.

Let me know the results of item 2 above. If that's not the issue, I have other suggestions.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

Hi, Sean.

The following are some additional, common causes of sleep-related issues in Mac OS X beyond those you have already noted. If the problem arose suddenly, first consider any changes you made to your Mac before the problem arose.

1. Sleep problems can be caused by balky USB peripherals. Mac OS X power management is sensitive to malfunctioning USB devices or those which do not recognize power management commands. Check or remove USB peripherals, except your Apple keyboard and mouse, to see if this resolves the issue. If so, find the errant device by process of elimination: reconnecting the peripherals you disconnected one at a time until the problem recurs.

2. Selecting "Receive Faxes on this computer" in the System Preferences > Print & Fax > Faxing tab has caused idle sleep problems for some. Deselect this option if selected.

3. Applications or processes continuously writing to the Console logs can prevent the hard drive from sleeping, and hence the Mac. Check Console to see if a message is being written every minute or less. In addition to certain HP printers as previously discussed, Software for Canon scanners are known to cause this problem. If you have a Canon scanner and disconnect it from the computer, then the messages

<code style="background:#F0F8FF">Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717</code>

or

<code style="background:#F0F8FF">Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8719</code>

are written every few seconds to Console, preventing sleep. If that's the case, let me know and I can give you instructions for that.

Otherwise, analyzing the repeating Console messages is required.

Launch Console (in Applications > Utilities). Check both the console.log and system.log for blocks of recurring messages written therein at high frequency.

To open the console.log and system.log files, in Console select File > Open, then select:

- "Open Console Log" to open the console.log file.
- "Open System Log" to open the system.log file.

Note: console.log may open by default when you launch Console.

If you find blocks of messages that repeat at high frequency, copy and paste a sample of them into a reply here for analysis. Please do not post the entire log.

4. Legacy or third-party PCI or SCSI cards that fail to recognize Mac OS X power management commands. These may require a firmware or driver update from the card's manufacturer.

5. Reset the PRAM or the PMU / SMU for your specific Mac.

Note that some of the information above is from the "Sleep" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

---
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Sean, I am having the same troubles, but I do not see any HP preferences that need to be turned off in System Prefs. I would like to add a bit more to the description of what my computer does when not sleeping properly. I have the energy saver set to sleep my system after 15 min, but like you, I always have to use the manual method by going to the Apple menu.

My energy saver also has the "put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" activated. Now if I leave my computer idle for more than fifteen minutes, I notice that it will attempt to go to sleep, but it only happens for short intervals; maybe as short as 30 seconds or as long as 3 minutes. Long story short, the system never does goes to full sleep mode automatically. I just would like to know if your Mac does something similar to mine?

I'm having exactly the same problem.
I guess I'll be following this thread closely.

It looks like it was my fault. D'Oh.

For some reason I had checked "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access." in the Enery saver options.
After deselecting this, Sleep Mode seems to be behaving as expected again.

So just ignore me.

Joey, you know, I never paid attention to that until I read your post. Turns out, I had the same option checked in Energy Saver, so I'll see what happens now.

And to everyone, I made an appt at the Genius Bar here in NYC yesterday, and I was told that most of the time there is something corrupt (either software or OS X itself) that is causing the problem. He told me to reset the Power Manager which I understand to be a small button near the memory slot on my iMac G$ 800. Never heard of this method before, but I guess I'll be searching the document database in a few minutes.

Before you go resetting your PM, try running Cocktail or Onyx.

These programs can help with sofware issues (like sleeping properly)

I run Cocktail - which takes care of permissions/ cache cleaning / cron scripts, etc.

Joey,

I do not think you should be ignored.

No need to apologize, matter of fact that was a very helpful observation!

It seems that after the Mac OS X Update v10.3.9 my computer was exhibiting sleep deprivation problems too.

I never made any changes to the "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access," preference but I looked at it after reading your note and sure enough it was checked.

Deselecting restored it restored my computer to its previous well rested state.

Thanks,

;~)

Joey,

I do not think you should be ignored.

No need to apologize, matter of fact that was a very helpful observation!

It seems that after the Mac OS X Update v10.3.9 my computer was exhibiting sleep deprivation problems too.

I never made any changes to the "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access," preference but I looked at it after reading your note and sure enough it was checked.

Deselecting restored it restored my computer to its previous well rested state.

Thanks,

;~)

Same thing was happening to me. I did an Archive & Install with my Panther discs and now I have no problem with the sleep timer and am running 10.3.9. I called Apple tech service 3 times and they tried having me delete a few files which did NOT work. It came down to either an Archive & Install or Tiger. I am going to wait a bit until I get Tiger now.

Hi, Ferd II and Joey.

I was interested in your reports that deselecting "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access" (WFENAA) cured your idle sleep problems. If that was also the case for Sean, then Yang's advice might have worked.

If WFENAA is selected, this sets the property Wake On LAN in the com.apple.PowerManagement.plist file in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. Trashing that file and restarting should have resulted in that preference being reset to defaults, and I believe the default is for WFENAA to be disabled (I'll have to double-check that at some point).

Selecting WFENAA also sets the womp — "wake on magic packet" — parameter in pmset to 1. Energy Saver preferences are simply a GUI to pmset.

The WFENAA / womp settings enable a network administrator to wake a sleeping Mac for activities such as installing updates via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). See "Energy Saver: How to Use the 'Wake for administrator access' Feature."

In my tests, enabling WFENAA did not prohibit sleep on my Mac. Technically, it should not prohibit sleep, since it is intended to awaken a remote, sleeping Mac if the appropriate packet is received.

My Mac is on an AirPort network and there's some conflicting information w.r.t. womp and AirPort-equipped computers. That conflicting information would not necessarily be pertinent to this problem: it might apply if one could not use ARD to wake a sleeping Mac that had WFENAA enabled but was connected via AirPort to its network.

However, it does beg the question: what type of network connections are you using? AirPort or Ethernet?

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

My older G4 AGP has been having chronic wake failure since 10.3.8 and continuing with 10.3.9. The system log shows the following sequence before each fatal sleep (restart required):

Apr 28 16:48:53 localhost configd[106]: executing /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Contents/Resources/set-hostna me
Apr 28 16:48:53 localhost mach_init[2]: Server 22eb in bootstrap d03 uid 0: "/usr/sbin/lookupd": exited as a result of signal 1 [pid 441]
Apr 28 16:48:53 localhost lookupd[450]: lookupd (version 324.13) starting - Thu Apr 28 16:48:53 2005
Apr 28 16:48:54 localhost set-hostname[465]: setting hostname to Vins-G4.local
Apr 29 10:48:31 localhost syslogd: restart