How to remotely power on the Mac Mini (Wake-on-LAN)

As the name says, this feature is to wake computers on a LAN, this means the computer has to be asleep, not shutdown. If it is shutdown it is not sleeping and therefore cannot be woken.

If it is any help you can set the Mac to shutdown and startup according to a schedule, this is configured in Energy Saver settings in System Preferences. You could then have it start up at a specific time, allow it to go to sleep, wake it over the LAN, but it would then later shutdown.

When the Mac mini is asleep the hard drives are completely powered down, even in full normal use a Mac mini uses compared to most other PCs very little power and when asleep it uses hardly any at all.

You can see Apple's webpage on the subject of power consumption for the Mac mini here http://www.apple.com/macmini/environment.html and a more detailed report showing it only uses a platry 1.16 watts when asleep here http://images.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/MacMini_PER_20110720.pdf

Curious, how are you using WiFi to wake it up?...that's precisely what I'm trying to do since I have no LAN cable connected...where Wake-on-LAN would be the answer.

Any updates on this? Cannot believe Apple is not enabling full fledged WoL - my iMac spins up the hard drive once an hour for no apparent reason and that is why I don't want it just asleep as I have it in my bedroom; it is annoying during the night (as it wakes me up too!)... I had no problem waking up my old IBM PC either that was fully powered off as it kept power to the NIC - Link LED was always on. There has to be a way to enable this in BIOS/UEFI or in the OS - or is the hardware simply not 100% WoL compiant?

Hello!!!

2 days ago I was trying to compare the settings of my MacBook Pro (which wakes on lan without any issue) with the settings of my iMac (which disconnects from the network after something like 6 hours of sleep).

I was thinking it should be something related about how the Mac handle the sleep and how it reacts during the sleep mode. In the preferences, I've noticed that my MacBook Pro uses hibernate mode 3, my iMac uses hibernate mode 0.

So, I changed the hibernate mode to 3 on my iMac. And over 12 hours of sleep I was able to wake it up without any issue. At the same time, I changed the hibernate mode on my MacBook Pro to 0. Guess what? It reacts like the iMac now, it disconnects from the network after 6 hours of sleep.

To change your hibernate mode type in terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

If you want more information about hibernate modes, here's the link

http://www.macworld.com/article/1053471/sleepmode.html

I'll inform you if the problem comes back.

As I understand it, Apple implemented "Wake on Demand" in Snow Leopard which wakes a Mac from sleep when a Bonjour service (mDNS) is accessed. This works fine in my case, but it does conflict with WOL "Wake on LAN". Wake on Demand works fine for most cases, but I would like to be able to turn the Mac back on over the LAN if the Mac powers itself off for say an UPS trigger. I would like to be able to do both, but seem to be able to make only one or the other work.

I realize this is an old discussion but it's one of the top search results for this topic.

Apple does not currently support Wake-on-lan from the S5 state (powered off but still plugged in) for Macintoshes.

It does support WOL for S3 and S4 states (Sleep and Hibernation) That's the state where the computer is powered off, but still plugged in, with a very small amount of power being used.