Sometimes my tired old MacBook won’t wake from sleep.
Lets be honest, there are lots of things it won’t do anymore, including ‘staying switched on’, sometimes.
But one of those things is that if it’s left open and goes into sleep mode, sometimes it won’t wake up. It clearly starts to, the fan kicks in, the screen flickers briefly, then it just sits. I’ve tried leaving it – sometimes it’ll stay like that for a very long period (at which point I usually power cycle it), sometimes it crashes and reboots itself. It does appear on the network, but SSH et al. don’t seem to be up at the point at which it stops. So it seemed, until today, rebooting or waiting for a crash were the only options.
But yesterday I had a brief dink with a network app on my phone – when for some inexplicable in the reason the router decided to tell everyone it was connected to the internet, but not actually be connected. Or at least, not sharing the internet-love with the devices in the house. And I wasn’t sure, initially, if it was my flakey laptop, or the router. Things were generally being odd. So I used the networking tools app on the phone. And lo, it was the router, and lo, it was rebooted. Everything was good.
But it clearly stuck in my head that I could send ‘Wake on Lan’ signals via the app, because when the MacBook wouldn’t come on, I remembered that I could send it a wake-up from the phone.
And lo, it worked.
And I was stunned.
So yay for small victories.
