Sometimes, it may seem convenient to quickly connect a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse to a Mac OS X Server machine for administration. The not so intuitive consequence of this however is, that at future startups, if there’s no keyboard or mouse connected to the machine (which is the common case with servers), Mac OS X will by default fall back to searching for that once connected Bluetooth keyboard or mouse and even stops booting when it doesn’t find them.
In order to prevent this, do the following on your Mac OS X Server:
- Open Bluetooth Preferences
- Disconnect and remove any associated Bluetooth devices
- Click the “Advanced…” button
- In the advanced Bluetooth settings, deselect both “Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup if no keyboard is detected” and “Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup if no mouse or trackpad is detected”
- Unless really needed, disable Bluetooth on a server. So, better grab a USB keyboard and mouse next time you need to do some admin ;)