“Reader G. Murray needs to restart his Mac at times when it’s not within arm’s reach — or even with walking legs’ reach,” Glenn Fleishman writes for Macworld.
“He’s wondering what options are available with modern Macs,” Fleishman writes. “His Mac is located on a network created by a Time Machine, so it has a privately assigned IP address using NAT (Network Address Translation).”
Fleishman writes, “Two kinds of options apply here: for when the Mac is still ticking away but isn’t doing what you want, so you want to restart it if only you could connect remotely to it; or when the Mac is unreachable and ostensibly crashed or experiencing other problems, and you want to power cycle it.”
How to remotely connect to a working Mac and how to remotely powercycle your Mac here.
MacDailyNews Take: We use Back to My Mac often while on the road to connect to the iMacs on our desks. It’s ver powerful when you have the right setup. If you don’t, Fleishman offers some other options that are well worth checking out.
As long as the machine is no hung, all you have to do is leave an email client running on the machine. When the mail client receives a message from a specific email address with a specific Subject line like “Restart#$”, the mail client can trigger a one line AppleScript to trigger a restart. Works really well, and no threat of random people restarting the machine since they would have to spoof the From address and know the trigger word.
tell application “Finder”
restart
end tell
You will have to test whether other applications throw dialogs that interfere with the shutdown process, but there are fairly easy ways around that.
Timbuktu 8.8.5 does work with 10.12.4, although it can be a bit flaky and is no longer formally available from Arris; they do continue to provide technical support for it. Try http://www.arris.com/Support if you want to explore that.