Remote into Mac Mini after a reboot
Apple supports this out of the box. Under the Sharing preference pane you need to enable either the Screen Sharing or the Remote Management and then use the Computer Settings dialog to enable VNC.



The service starts up automatically when incoming network traffic on the VNC ports is detected by the OS. Now, you do need to get past any FileVault pre-login screen where the full actual OS isn't running yet. To restart and skip FileVault one time, use:

fdesetup authrestart


You might need to watch for DHCP traffic and see if the Mac is rejoining the network and asking for an address from the router if you can't find the machine on reboot. For troubleshooting, you could assign a static IP address so that you're sure it's not a DHCP issue.

The problem also could be your choice of VNC client and it's not expecting to connect to OS X Lion or newer. Some older clients break when Apple allows a choice to connect to the logged in user or a new login window. The client needs to reconnect once the session drops to log you in.


Are the changes to Lion&#39;s screen sharing documented anywhere publicly?
RealVNC on Lion


One client I like on iOS and Mac OS X is http://edovia.com/screens/ Of course Apple's free Screen Sharing app (look for it in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications ) and Apple Remote Desktop work well, too.