Mac Pro and Sleep

Yeah, I know it's been a long time since I have written anything, but, hey, my life is busy :)

Wanted to start out with a fix that may benefit other users. I have a Mac Pro from a couple of years ago as my work computer. It's running latest version of Snow Leopard. The one thing that I do at might is to sleep my Mac. I usually just log off and after a time it goes to sleep. For the longest time that worked really well. Then all of a sudden I started having problems. The Pro would go to sleep OK, and would wake up OK, but when I would go to log in, it would hang with the spinning wheel and I would be totally stuck. I would have to push the power button in order to shut it down and then I could reboot and all was OK. Talked to Apple tech support about this as well as other "in the know" Mac guys. We never came up with anything of value. Of course I looked at my console logs and there were errors there, but nothing ever really popped for me.

I even tried putting it to sleep myself, thinking if I was not at the login prompt perhaps it would work OK, but no, that didn't help. I tried doing a restart instead of just logging in, but that failed as well.

I finally got tired of this and one day when it happened I decided to go looking for the reason. Once I got the Mac back up, I really looked closely at the console logs and I noticed several entries relating to issues with some kernel processes all starting with vmnet. Now, I am running VMWare Fusion, although I have actually move to Parallels (another post at some point). But the product is still installed and is there for my use. Now I didn't understand why these processes were running when I wasn't using the program. And I had kind of come to the conclusion that there was some networking issue at play here and this kind of confirmed it.

But how to dump these processes? I eventually found a post from someone about how to get rid of them. There is a file in /Library/LaunchDaemons that runs at boot that starts these things up. The fix was to remove that plist file from this directory. I did that and then rebooted the Mac. When I checked the Activity monitor they were not running. Then the acid test; I logged out of my Mac at the end of the day and let it go to sleep. Since then I have not had one problem with the Pro sleeping or waking up or hanging.

Now the problem is that I need to occasionally run Fusion and these processes are essential to that working. So I found someone who had written a couple of scripts to start up and shut down these processes. I modified them to work for me and now when I need to run Fusion, I can run the start up script and then start Fusion. When I am done, I can run the stop script and it stops the processes. Wonderful!