I am running RouterOS V2.8.12 on a Routerboard230. I am setting up a remote controlled power cycling facility and I’m wondering whether to include the router in the cycled equipment. Can I damage or corrupt files in RouterOS by power cycling at random times?
Thanks,
Guy
my experience tells me this is safe to do as we rebooted / switched off routers hundreds times. We use classic ATX computers with PCI wireless cards and EIDE harddisks.
I would go for it.
Thanks, mp3turbo2. I am using flash disk in the Routerboard 230 so I would think this would be even safer than hard disk drive.
Hopefully, I will not be power cycling too often!
what are you going to use for remote power cycling?
Good question Harvski.
It was actually posts from you (dslreports, I think) that got me thinking about this.
I’ve looked at this http://www.radio-tech.co.uk/pageswitch.html though I’ve not got a price for it yet. This works with Vodafone’s paging service which I’m not very keen on because therer is a monthly subscription fee and everyone else in the UK seems to be shutting down there paging services. So, I’m going to have a go at modifying a mobile phone. You can get a PAYG sim only deal from orange or T-mobile which comes with a pounds worth or credit with no expiry date so in theory I should be able to call into this for ever for just the cost of the calls.
Everyone I know seems to have a kitchen drawer full of old mobile phones so these should be free.
My biggest worry is opeing the phone and finding somewhere to connect a relay to without destroying the whole thing.
Guy
PS Just got a quote of 160 quid for the pageswitch module 
You could use a script that would do a regular reboot (including proper shutdown). Also, there is an internal reboot watchdog that you can set (see manual) if the system hangs.
There are a number of protections for the file system for power failure based cycling, and I have not seen any problems in a couple of years with this. But, there still is the remote possibility that something important is being written to disk and it could be corrupted and the recover would not be successful.
John
I was blissfully unaware any paging services were being shut down in the UK.
Tully: would you reccomend rebooting the MT RouterOS software regularly? as I have just leave my routers running and then reboot if I need to upgrade, last time I’d look it was over 3 months old.
I would only suggest rebooting if you know of some bug that occurs that can be helped by periodic rebooting.
For v2.8.13, I don’t know of any such bugs. In the past, for some configurations, we have had memory leaks that took days to show up and then a periodic reboot would actually help. But, there are no know issues at the moment.
If the router is in some place where you can’t even easily power cycle (pull the plug) it, then I would suggest having the watchdog enabled. It is not enabled by default.
In v2.9, it will be enabled by default and also have some special debugging features that tell you when you have had a watchdog timeout – and also it will make a supout file that can’t be sent to us to find the problem.
John
hello,
i am quite interested in the watchdog feature, but can not find it in the manual. could you please drop me a page number or something?
TIA
thanks, that made it.
(it is not in the 2.8 pdf-document)