Can pmset be used in OS X Yosemite?

Question

Can pmset be used in OS X Yosemite?

Since the update to Yosemite, we cannot utilise the power management features to reboot the Mac unless we have the user logged into the Mac.

So instead, we tried to use pmset to override the power management features, however it has not worked. The command I entered was as follows;

sudo pmset repeat shutdown U 00:01:00 poweron U 00:05:00

Entering the command did not present any error messages so assumed it has worked, however when I checked the uptime on the Mac following the scheduled reboot, we found it had not rebooted.

The same commands have been used in OS X Maverick and we found it to work.

Can anyone help?

Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Apr 30, 2015 4:04 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,452 points

Apr 30, 2015 4:42 AM in response to Jacko22021981

Why not simply use the System Preferences ▸ Energy Saver ▸ Schedule… instead?

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Answer 2

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Apr 30, 2015 5:31 AM in response to Jacko22021981

Power management certainly has got more complicated with each revision of OS X. I'm not sure whether the Yosemite will 'wake up in order to shutdown'. However, 'pmset -g' should list all the settings and assertions currently in force and I would start by making sure that these are as expected.

C.

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Answer 3

Apr 30, 2015 6:21 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks, we have tried this, however it doesn't work if the user isn't logged into the Mac.

Our Mac's are being used as recording servers. They sit on the network without any keyboard, monitor, mouse etc connected to them. Every so often, the Mac's will crash and will require a hard reboot. However these Mac's are located all across the country so it makes physically rebooting them very difficult. We have found on the Maverick OSX Mac's, a weekly reboot schedule prevents them from crashing.

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Answer 4

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Apr 30, 2015 7:19 AM in response to cdhw

Okay, I've just done an experiment. Used an iMac and OS X 10.10.3 machine awake showing login screen with no user logged in and schedule a shutdown followed by a restart. The power management system did try to shut the machine down at the specified time but was prevented from doing so by a dialog that said 'There is a user sharing this computer if you shutdown they will be disconnected' and offered Cancel and Shutdown options. My guess is that this 'user' was associated with file sharing. I waited 7 minutes before getting bored, but it may well have sat there forever.

Anyway, I think this rules out having 'no user logged in' as the root cause of your problem.

OS X does have a 'helpful' habit of refusing to restart if applications don't quit gracefully or there are active network connections. You may find a solution that wraps shutdown(8) in a launch agent/daemon is a bit more robust.

It seems to me that this whole approach is a bit crass. You are not specific about what you mean by 'Mac's will crash and will require a hard reboot' but assuming you are not getting kernel panics it would be a lot easier to kill and restart the application/daemon that is flakey.

C.

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Answer 5

eddie233

Level 1

0 points

Aug 25, 2015 6:25 AM in response to Jacko22021981

I too am having this issue in my labs since upgrading to 10.10. Scheduled shutdowns only work if a user is logged in. Have you found any solution to this? pmset was a great tool for 10.9.

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Answer 6

eddie233

Level 1

0 points

Aug 25, 2015 7:13 AM in response to Jacko22021981

I just found this in Energy Saver's help box:

"Your Mac must be awake and you must be logged in for it to shut down at the scheduled time. If you are not logged in or your Mac is in sleep, it won’t shut down."

Is this a new feature of 10.10? Maybe there is a way to override?

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Answer 7

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,452 points

Aug 25, 2015 7:54 AM in response to Jacko22021981

There is also Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) management that can shutdown a remote machine, and if that remote machine supports ARD Lights Out Management (LOM), you can see a list of computers on your screen that can be remotely powered on (not using wake on LAN).

Chapter 8 of the ARD Administrators Guide discusses this.

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Answer 8

eddie233

Level 1

0 points

Aug 25, 2015 7:57 AM in response to VikingOSX

I found that this is my solution for now. I use a scheduled ARD Unix command to shut down my machines in the evening, while pmset poweron still works in the morning (LOM is not supported on my Macs) as long as the machines were powered down.

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Answer 9

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Aug 25, 2015 8:38 AM in response to eddie233

In many cases this sort of messing around is pointless. According to:

http://images.apple.com/ca/environment/reports/

a sleeping iMac 21.5" consumes ca 0.9 W and one that is 'off' consumes ca 0.2 W. In order to achieve that 0.7 W saving you are waking them up with ARD, shutting down and then restarting the following morning. It wouldn't surprise me if this activity, along with the server that is needed to run ARD, wrote off most of the power saving. Assuming you are not causing additional 'wear and tear' and are getting the full 0.7 W reduction for, say, 16 hours a day on 365 days a year that's saving you 4 kWhr, or about $0.50 per machine per year.

C.

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