Managing Scheduled Display & System Sleep Settings For Kiosk Macs

[dstranathan]

Does anyone out there have Jamf-managed Macs that are deployed in the role of autonomous kiosks (such as digital signage, visual art installations, etc)?

I'm curious as to what method(s) you have adopted to manage Energy Saver and Display settings. We will be deploying Macs that will need to be awake from 7 AM to 7 PM but otherwise, they can their displays can sleep etc.

-Profiles
-Policies/scripts (caffeinate, etc)
-Scripts
-Launchgents, etc

Lots of ways to do this, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Any input is appreciated!

[sdagley]

@dstranathan I use scripts to call the pmset tool to configure the settings I want. There's no --help option for the pmset tool, but 'man pmset' will give you all the options.

For the use you describe it might be simplest to configure them to wake up at 7am and shut down at 7pm with the display set to never sleep (there's no concept of a scheduled time for display sleep). The alternative approach would be to have a LaunchDaemon trigger at 7am daily that disables display sleep, and another that triggers at 7pm to enable display sleep.

[Greenfelder]

The login window screen settings are a bunch of configurations that allow you to customize the login screen of your macOS devices. These settings are located on the System Preferences and will help you make tweaks like displaying a list of users, setting the appearance of the login window, showing control buttons, and more.

[dstranathan]

I have the Macs set up with a dedicated user account that uses a login window profile to manage the automatic login process for the account etc. This works great. 

I'm more interested in keeping the Mac awake/responsive during business hours and allowing it to sleep at night.

[dstranathan]

We are testing an Energy Saver configuration profile now (i.e.; Wake at 7 AM, Sleep at 7 PM etc) and it works technically but I hate that Apple has hard-coded a 10-minute warning pop-up dialog stating "This computer has been scheduled to sleep..." I'd prefer the profile to be clean and less 'chatty'...