Apple Macs: Is it possible to boot my mac mini remotely?

October 2, 2009 2:54 AM

Apple Macs: Is it possible to boot my mac mini remotely?

I use my mac mini as a media center displayed through a 46" tv along with apple's bluetooth keyboard and a USB mouse. The setup itself sits nicely inside a glass shelf; however, everytime I'd like to turn it on, I have to physically get up and press the little button in the back of the mac mini.

I use this quite often as I'm living abroad and can watch US television through slingbox. Is it possible to remotely boot my mac mini through the keyboard or some kind of remote control?

posted by telsa to technology (7 comments total)

I believe you can have it sleep and wake it up with the official apple remote, but not technically turn it on and off.
posted by sharkfu at 3:39 AM on October 2

Sleep would be the way to go, it uses only 1.5W of power when asleep.
posted by jedrek at 5:39 AM on October 2

Almost all recent Macs support Ethernet Wake-on-LAN. For it to work, I think you need to enable "Wake for network administrator access" or something similar in the Energy Save control panel. I'm not sure if it will wake from being totally cold, or if it will just come up for sleep. But that is the closest you're going to get.

The trick is that you need something else on your network to send the "wake up" packet. If I go into the management interface of my router (WRT54GL running DD-WRT) it has an option to send out an WoL packet to any IP address on the LAN. There are also lots of utilities for both Mac, Linux, and Windows that you can run on another computer to do the trick.

I am pretty sure that you can only Wake on LAN, not boot on LAN, so if you're wed to the idea of shutting the system down completely versus putting it to sleep, you may be out of luck. But if sleep is an option I think it'll work.

One final note: it will probably only work over wired Ethernet; I don't think that sleep leaves the WLAN modem running, so it wouldn't work if that's how the machine is connected.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:04 AM on October 2

If you have a wired keyboard attached to your Mac Mini, pressing any key will wake the computer from sleep (not from power off).

Wake-on-LAN is another good option, assuming you have a way to send the magic packet. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, there is at least one Wake-on-LAN app in the App Store which you could try.
posted by Nothlit at 6:58 AM on October 2

Seconding sleep/wake with the remote (hold down the play button).
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 7:58 AM on October 2

The power-on keyboard key was one of the nicest things about Macs for 20 years. Naturally, they removed it. Apple is like some kind of half-genius, half-moron mad scientist.

I agree that sleep is the way to go (I haven't turned a Mac off in... um... a year?)

If you really need turn on / turn off for some reason, though, there are actual power bars that can be activated over the internet or with a telephone call. Just Bing "remote power" and you'll find many.
posted by rokusan at 8:19 AM on October 2

How would the remote power bar work? You'd have to shut down the mac, otherwise you'd risk damaging the file structure from suddenly losing power mid-operation. Then remote off the power bar. Then when you remote powered on the bar... wouldn't you still have to get up and turn on the mini?
posted by sharkfu at 2:44 PM on October 2