[Update] The script will work with any router that has telnet access, i.e., Dynalink Routers.

My Western Digital My Net N900 router works fine for a while, but then performance degrades requiring a reboot. I guess this is quite usual with relatively low-cost routers.

The problem is that the router doesn’t have a feature to schedule an automatic reboot and I find it quite annoying to restart manually.

Luckily there is a way to overcome this limitation of the router. You will need to have access to a Linux machine in your network that we’ll use to reboot the router remotely. I have a Raspberry Pi as HTPC which is connected to my network, and it’s on all the time, so I will be using that for this purpose.

Gain access to the router

The router can be accessed remotely is you enable “telnet” or “ssh” on it. This can be done via the web interface. My router has the IP address 192.168.1.16 and I will be using this IP in my examples, but your router might be accessible via 192.168.1.1.

To enable the telnet service you need to access this URL on your router:

http://192.168.1.16/telnet.php

Once this is enabled you should be able to get access to the router:

xbian@xbian ~ $ telnet 192.168.1.16 23

Entering character mode
Escape character is '^]'.

login: Alphanetworks
Password: wrgnd15_wd_pro

BusyBox v1.18.1 (2013-04-12 18:22:04 PHT) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
#

If you run the command “reboot” the router would reboot.

Reboot the router remotely

So far we gained access to the router, and we saw we could reboot it, but we want to do this remotely. For this, we’ll create a script on the Raspberry Pi that will log in to the router and execute the reboot command.

On the Linux box create a file named “reboot_n900” that will have this content:

reboot_n900

#!/usr/bin/expect
set timeout 10
set ip 192.168.1.16
set port 23
set username Alphanetworks
set password wrgnd15_wd_pro
spawn telnet $ip $port
expect "login:" {
 send "$username\r"
 expect "Password:"
 send "$password\r"
}
expect "#"
send "reboot\r"

Make sure the file is executable:

chmod +x reboot_n900

We will be using a script called “expect” and you will need to install this dependency:

 sudo apt-get install expect

The script needs to be run as is (do not run with sh since it’s not a shell script!):

xbian@xbian ~ $ ./reboot_n900

Now all that’s left is to schedule the script to run every night at 4am. We can add this to the cron job.

# crontab -e
0 4 * * * /home/xbian/reboot_n900

Let me know if this worked for you or if you need more details.

(in case you want to switch to a root account run: login orion orion)
(more info about wd n900: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/wd/n900)