Locking my machine causes my network Connection to sleep Is there a way to lock my screen but not sleep my network connection? I step away from desk quite a bit and I lock the screen pretty much every time. When I come back I always from stepping away for like 5 minutes it seems like my machine has to reacquire an IP. This via ethernet. This is on a 2010 13' unibody macbook pro running Lion.
If your MacBook is plugged in I would try the following.


Change the Engery Prefs to not spin down the disk or sleep the computer when it's plugged in.
Activate the Screen Saver to turn on at a hot corner.
Set the Screen Saver prefs to require password to log back in.


Now see if activating the Screen Saver causes you to loose your assigned IP.

The alternate method is to manually assign an IP to your MacBook while you're at work.