PC sleeps after RDC

johnt · June 17, 2024

I use a PC with Windows 11 as a JBOD. It is a headless unit, and lives in my garage and it has like 7 drives in it. Occasionally, I use RDC to log into the computer for management and copying files. I want to automate the file transfer, but I can't trust it yet.

It's an i3 12100, 16 GB memory, ASUS board, iGPU only but headless, and it does have an LSI HBA.

From a cold start (shutdown to boot), I can log into RDC, close the connection, and it works as intended. I can reconnect as many times as I want, and the PC continues running and processing transfers when I am not connected. For emphasis, after a cold boot or restart, RDC behaves as expected.

The problem begins after I put the PC to sleep. I can "wake" the PC using WOL without issues. After logging into RDC, the PC immediately goes to sleep when I disconnect from the RDC session. This happens even if there is activity like transferring files. It just sleeps upon clicking the X or disconnect. If I wake the PC and restart it, it behaves normally again. I am not sure how to fix this.

I've scoured a couple forums and there has been no successful fix, and the posts appear recent (1 to 3 months). I have sleep set to "never," and I cannot disable sleep mode because otherwise WOL doesn't work on Windows 11. I also don't see any settings in the RDC interface to prevent this. Any ideas?