OpenWrt: Automatic Daily Router Reboot with Cron

I have a TP-Link TL-WR842ND Wi-Fi router, and I flashed OpenWrt on it for more features and stability.

OpenWrt has lots of advantages and runs much more stably, but occasional hangs still happen — especially with 5–10 clients and long uptime on a UPS. A couple of times DHCP stopped handing out IP addresses, and a reboot fixed it. To avoid such glitches I decided to reboot the router automatically once a day.

Task: reboot the router automatically with the OpenWrt task scheduler (cron).

Solution

Open the router’s web interface (LuCI) → System → Scheduled Tasks and add a task to reboot every day at 7:05. Set your time zone correctly and check the router’s clock first (System → System).

Add the line:

5 7 * * * reboot

The fields are: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. So 5 7 * * * means 07:05 every day.

Click Save (or Submit in older versions) and reboot the router once so the cron service picks up the change.

Via SSH

echo '5 7 * * * reboot' >> /etc/crontabs/root
/etc/init.d/cron enable
/etc/init.d/cron restart

Tip: with sleep 70 && touch /etc/banner && reboot instead of plain reboot you avoid a reboot loop if the clock jumps back after boot on routers without an RTC.

That’s it — now you can forget where the router even is