dongle to reboot hanging mac

[James Sentman]

I remember Keep It UP! 

I am not aware of anything exactly like that now, but there are a lot of wifi or zwave controllable sockets or power strips that you could use to plug the mac into. They have their own “cloud” services or you could do something with passing through an encrypted pipe to them or something to give yourself the ability to hit them remotely.

If you used a ZWave switch then you could write some scripts or actions inside either the Vera or the hubitat to make sure that the switch is always on except for when you’re specifically doing a restart. Both of those devices have their “cloud” interface to the units that are attached to them. I don’t use it myself, so I don’t know the specifics, but you could definitely control such a device remotely or even do something more complicated to let the hub check the Mac directly and take action on it’s own.

That combined with the “restart after power failure” option turned on in the power/battery control panel would definitely bring the device back up if it hung and you were able to remote control the socket.

There MIGHT be more interesting ways to actually issue a hold the power key down type shutdown and restart. There is code for some of the USB capable arduino devices that can emulate a USB keyboard and send keystrokes. I looked at it a few years ago for a similar thing and I vaguely remember that you could send any key code not just the regular ones. I think I even found some folks talking about pressing the Mac power key with it or something similar and was able to get the keycode that apple uses for it. I’m not sure it would actually work and then all the rest of the support stuff and figuring out how to get it on the network in a way you could reach would be up to your own code skills ;) 



> On Feb 23, 2022, at 9:20 AM, ard jonker <ard.jonker at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> Is there a modern USB HID device that has a watchdog timer, a little companion software that listens to Applescript events and that can simulate key presses equivalent to 'Reboot mac!' (CTRL-CMD-POWER)?
> 
> Or one that acts as a web server, connects to the router and when triggered by a certain web page, will do the same?
> 
> It is to resurrect a very remote mac if it hangs.
> 
> I seem to remember that those existed back in the ADB-time days. Keep Me Up, was it?

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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