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cgc · Jul 12, 2007, 09:36 PM

Hi, I just returned from a business trip and my wife told me my MacPro was turning itself on at night or early morning. Before I left I noticed my Mac on in the morning and didn't remember leaving it on.

I checked Energy Pane, Cron, and Synk (the three apps that are capable of turning my Mac on that's I've fiddled with before) and none were scheduled. Is there a way to find out what applications have recently run (maybe the Console...not sure specifically though)?

Thanks.

Suikolove · Jul 12, 2007, 09:52 PM

Maybe you accidentally put it into Standby mode instead, unless Standby is a PC-only thing...

Chips G · Jul 12, 2007, 09:57 PM

My MacBook does the same thing! I have Alarmclock installed, but it wakes up before Alarmclock is set to go off!

Very strange.

OreoCookie · Jul 12, 2007, 10:07 PM

Check whether the `wake-up on lan' check box is ticked (located in the Sys Prefs > Energy Pane). (It's not 100 % clear to me whether you have just checked that you haven't set a wake-up/sleep time.)

Also, USB devices may wake up your Mac, too. What devices have been connected to your Mac Pro?

cgc · Jul 12, 2007, 10:52 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

Check whether the `wake-up on lan' check box is ticked (located in the Sys Prefs > Energy Pane). (It's not 100 % clear to me whether you have just checked that you haven't set a wake-up/sleep time.)

Also, USB devices may wake up your Mac, too. What devices have been connected to your Mac Pro?

My "Wake on LAN" is unchecked. The only USB devices that are connected are my Apple keyboard and mouse. Can iCal wake up the computer?

Is there anything I can do afterwards (e.g. review logs, console, etc.) to figure out what happened?

cgc · Jul 12, 2007, 11:04 PM

Hmmm...I just unchecked "Wake to do backup" or however it's worded in Synk Pro. Don't think that's the cause as all my backups were manually done and required my external drive to be pulled out of the firebox and connected. Hopefully there was a glitch in the program.

I remember on my old Amiga 3000 I had a program that would monitor and log EVERYTHING that happened (for troubleshooting problems). It really slowed things down but to troubleshoot it was invaluable. Anything like that available for Mac as part of Developer Tools perhaps?

OreoCookie · Jul 12, 2007, 11:19 PM

Yeah, launch the Console and have a look at the system.log file. When I put my ProBook to sleep and wake it up, I'll see something like

***Wakein::CancelEvents: requested event type: wakepoweron
***Wakein::CancelEvents: requested app name: com.elgato.eyetv
***Wakein: 0 entries in power event schedule table

… followed by some network-related stuff. I would suspect that this is a good place to start. If you could quote relevant parts from the log file, perhaps we can dig deeper.

OreoCookie · Jul 12, 2007, 11:21 PM

Originally Posted by cgc

I remember on my old Amiga 3000 I had a program that would monitor and log EVERYTHING that happened (for troubleshooting problems). It really slowed things down but to troubleshoot it was invaluable. Anything like that available for Mac as part of Developer Tools perhaps?

An Amiga guy, huh?

Well, system.log is pretty thorough. There are log files for some of the other unix services, too.