i was a victim of the macos 49 day time bomb
a buddy of mine sent me this article this morning:
macOS has a 49.7-day networking time bomb
as i read it, something clicked in the back of my mind…last friday right as we were leaving to drive to tahoe, i started having trouble staying connected to my Plex server that runs on a mac mini under my desk. after futzing with my Caddy config and restarting Plex, among other troubleshooting, i eventually rebooted the machine and everything worked again 🤷♂️
and as it happened, i remembered having a short conversation with that same friend about how long our respective servers had been running…so i scrolled back through our chat history until i found that conversation. we’d been talking 17 days before my server started acting up. and sure enough, my uptime at that point was 32 days.
a funny coincidence, and a very frustrating mystery solved!
epilogue: once i figured this out, i immediately tried to configure my server to reboot itself weekly to avoid this problem…only to find that apple has inexplicably removed that control from System Settings 💀 you can still use pmset to configure schedules, or use a third-party app like onyx to configure pmset (which is what i did after briefly glancing at pmset’s syntax and deciding that wasn’t something i wanted to learn today). i’m baffled as to why apple would remove that control from settings that’s been there as long as i can remember having a mac, though.