Posted on 09-23-2019 08:52 AM
Hello,
I'm in the process of building macOS Mojave replacements for our legacy Mac servers. These will act as file share distribution points and have the content caching service installed. Server.app is installed but this probably isn't necessary since both of the above are built-in to macOS.
I've successfully deployed one Mac Mini as a POC, and while it works as intended the machine is constantly going to sleep and not responding to ICMP. It comes back eventually but makes it very difficult to use it as a file share distribution point in Jamf if it can't be mounted half the time.
Having tried pretty much everything (see below) I'm reaching out here to see if anyone else is having similar issues.
Things I've tried so far:
- Completely disable sleep, both in the UI and via command line (confirms that sleep is set to 'Never').
- Enabled "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off"
- Disabled "Put hard disks to sleep when possible"
- Disabled Power Nap
- Installed Caffeine and enabled "Indefinite" timer - no change
- Installed Amphetamine and activated - no change
- Disabled WiFi, set wired NIC to manual IP, DNS and search domain (in case something else was taking over it's IP)
- Changed IP completely to another reserved address
- Set automatic login using a local administrator account and disabling screen saver - no change
I seem to remember a while ago that a Mac Mini would sleep if a display wasn't connected. Connecting to a display is something I can try, but I'd rather avoid it since it defeats the purpose of a headless Mac. What I've found seems to help is opening a screen sharing session and closing the window instead of logging out, this is also less than ideal.
There are also no 'sleep' entries in the log files showing that the machine is actually sleeping, but it's the only thing I can think of that would cause this network behavior.
Grateful for any and all assistance!
Justin.
Posted on 09-23-2019 10:12 AM
As an update, I've set the duplex option in the ethernet NIC properties to "full-duplex" instead of "full-duplex, energy-efficient-ethernet". It seems slightly better but it's still dropping off the network for no reason.
Posted on 09-23-2019 10:55 AM
Update 2 (sorry): I set up the Mac at my desk and watched it drop packets while powered on and not asleep. I added a USB-C NIC and it has not dropped a single packet since. This looks to be a hardware issue at this point, but I'll have a hell of a time convincing Apple of that.