[Altimor]

OP — I’m not that privy to the details of what in the world was running on that MacBook Air, but I’m 100% sure it wasn’t “the production servers for Uber eats Canada.” It was some kind of hack doing some kind of thing on a recurring basis to make sure the service continued. These things were often hacked together by engineers, and sometimes ops people, in the middle of outages, as a stop gap.

[woleium]

Not that I condone this sort of thing, but folks who do need to do it should know about caffeine [0] which allows a Mac to disable it's lid switch and keep running with the lid closed.

[0] https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24120/caffeine

[Acen]

Side note, Caffeine[1][2] does not disable it's lid switch, but instead disables the automatic sleep behaviour while enabled.

[1] Author link (includes link to source): https://www.intelliscapesolutions.com/apps/caffeine

[2] Original author link (stopped updating before OSX Mojave): https://www.lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

[raihansaputra]

i switched from caffeine to amphetamine due to compat issues and amphetamine does have a mode to disable the lid switch

[fingerlocks]

Or you can use the built-in and more powerful commands: pmset and caffeinate.

E.g. you can prevent sleeping until another process exists, or initiate sleep or shutdown.

[JohnMakin]

yep definitely pulled this move before. Probably on a laptop because it is the only thing that has permissions to do whatever insanely janky thing it’s doing.

[justinclift]

Sounds like something probably in the System keychain, that's not getting unlocked when the user is logged out.

Incidentally, the command to unlock the system keychain (eg in a cronjob) is:

  systemkeychain -vt

That doesn't seem to be widely known, and is very useful for things like build jobs. ;)