MacBook spontaneously waking with security settings changed?
January 2, 2008 9:38 AM 
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What would cause a MacBook to spontaneously wake from sleep (roughly every few weeks, at apparently random intervals), with all of its Bluetooth Sharing checkboxes checked, when it was put to sleep with them unchecked?
This is second-hand from my mom, but here are the details I got by phone:
- Her MacBook's set to prompt for a password when it starts and when it wakes from sleep, so by spontaneous wakeup I mean that while the MacBook is in sleep (with its LED pulsing to indicate sleep), the screen suddenly lights up with the usual password prompt.
- It sleeps connected to AC but not to anything else (no network, no peripherals, bt off, Airport off).
- She's never used any bt device with this MacBook.
- Nobody else lives in her house, but the neighbors' houses are close, so I don't know whether any of her neighbors are physically within bt range (she REALLY wants to hear whether this could or couldn't be caused by someone else with a bt device trying to connect with her machine, and if so, whether that means anything in terms of nefarious file exchange possibilities).
- She doesn't have any third-party software that assumes or would be automatically checking for a bt device.
- She doesn't have any user-scheduled actions, alarms or other things that should be waking her machine from sleep.
- From what I gather her machine's very close to default setup in every way, w/ very little third-party sw and definitely nothing sketchy or unknown.
- Each time the machine wakes spontaneously, it seems to be in the same state it went to sleep in, except that when she goes and looks at the Network & bt preferences (since I advised her to uncheck all the "sharing" boxes in both), all three of the Bluetooth Sharing checkboxes ARE checked. She unchecks them and puts it back to sleep, and later it wakes normally.... until the next time this mysterious spontaneous-awakening happens and they're all checked again.
- Up until now she has not had "Require pairing for security" checked on the bt pane -- I just advised her to do that.
- This has happened several times over the last few months, not at the same time of day, but it's possible (not sure) they might have all been at the same interval after the MacBook was put to sleep. I think all have happened less than an hour after it was put to sleep.
posted by lorimer to computers & internet (2 comments total)
In OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the Bluetooth preference pane has a button labeled "Advanced...". The relevant checkbox is available when you click this button.
Note that this checkbox is not related to the Sharing preferences that you mentioned in your original post. I also believe that this optioned is enabled by default.
I had this same problem with my MacBook when I first got it; changing this option fixed it for me. However, I had my Bluetooth powered on in a classroom where everyone and his brother had a Bluetooth-enabled phone, so I'm not sure if this will help. The solution could, of course, have nothing to do with Bluetooth.
posted by Third at 10:36 AM on January 2, 2008