OK, I could use your help. I use Screens and Jump to remotely control my Mac when I’m traveling. Occasionally I’d like to reboot it but if I do that, my Mac stops at the login screen waiting for my password before either Screens or Jump can launch, so I lose access to my Mac. I’m thinking that there must be a reasonable way to login remotely so the Mac can continue the boot up process and give access back to Screens or Jump. I could Remote Login with ssh but that’s not the same thing; it won’'t get the Mac past it’s password screen…
Do you use an encrypted/FileVault startup disk? If so I believe this is a potential cause. A password is needed to decrypt the disk in order to boot the OS.
Ehh… stupid question… would I need to do something special to avoid this startup issue? Like specifically partition a separate startup disk or something?
I have FileVault on my iMac and pretty sure I also have this issue.
When a Mac is using Filevault and restarts, it requires a password or recovery key before it will even start the bootup process into OS X. (…) Mountain Lion 10.8.2 introduced authrestart. If you open terminal and run “fdesetup help” then you will see all the options with filevault.
Now, when you need to restart a remote Mac that is running Filevault 2, you will open terminal and type “sudo fdesetup authrestart”. After doing this, you’ll be prompted for your password. Once entered, the machine will restart and bring you back to the OS login. It’s a one time restart. It’s a great tool.
If you are not comfortable using the Terminal the only solution is to disable FileVault:
The third option would be to boot from an unencrypted external drive (which does not make much sense, I guess).
Just to see if I understand this. Will this process make this a permanent thing? So once I do this the computer will always load the OS on Restart? Or is this just to deal with a “I’m accessing the computer remotely and realise that I need to do a restart now” situation? The situation I’d like to have covered is “the Mac restarted for some reason, and now it’s inaccessible for remote access”.
Just to be clear: The sentence you quoted originates from Macminicolo. I only quoted their article.
As far as I do understand: Yes, exactly like that.
In that case, I do not see any other solution than to disable FileVault and depending on the way how you want to connect to your Mac remotely you might even have to turn on automatic login:
Of course, something like that should only be done if it is a desktop or to be more precise a Mac in a secure environment.
Yes, sorry about that. Poor quoting from my end! Didn’t intent to attribute the actual sentence to you.
Indeed. I’m not going to do that until I live in the center of a military facility or something with around the clock guards.
But then I know that it’s not me being bad at setting up this remote thing. I wonder if this will turn into an excuse for getting a Mac Mini to run along with my iMac…
I just tested the command line sudo fdesetup authrestart and it works! Thank you! Also be aware that it initiates an immediate shutdown - it kills any program running, so gracefully shutdown anything you have running before executing this command.
