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UrkoM
Asked: 2012-04-23 23:20:55 +0800 CST

VMWare Data Recovery 1.2 - schedule weekly reboot

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We run VMWare vSphere 4.1, and VMWare Data Recovery 1.2. We have a weekly window with no backups happening, and due to some instabilities, we would like to try scheduling an automatic weekly reboot of the VMWare Data Recovery appliance.

More specific details: - VMWare Data Recovery 1.2 seems to be based on CentOS 5.2. - We use NFS for data storage. The appliance sees this as local storage, but the drive is actually stored in a different building. Seems to work great, and so far has been significantly faster and more stable than CIFS (which we used before).

I have tried scheduling the reboot using /etc/cron.d within the VDR appliance itself:

/etc/cron.d/sunday_reboot:

45 1     * * sun   /usr/local/bin/custom_reboot.sh >> /var/log/reboot.log

/usr/local/bin/custom_reboot.sh:

#!/bin/bash
/bin/echo "==================================="
/bin/date
/bin/echo "Rebooting server now."
/usr/bin/reboot

I also restarted crond, /etc/init.d/crond restart However, /var/log/reboot.log stays empty, and uptime shows that no reboot ever happened.

What am I missing?

vmware-vsphere centos5

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Any reason you can't schedule the reboot outside of the OS, as detailed here? Reboot Virtual Machine every 20 minutes

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  2. The format of the file you created under /etc/cron.d is invalid. You missed the username field. So, try the following:

    45 1     * * sun  root /usr/local/bin/custom_reboot.sh >> /var/log/reboot.log

    Also, you need to check the permissions of the script you created and make sure it has execution permission x. This is to answer your question regarding the cron job.

    Continuously rebooting a server is not a good idea. It would be really better to find the issue instead of just rebooting even when you are doing it weekly.

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