Periodic router reload

Sometimes when using not-so-very stable IOS versions, periodic reload of a router during a non-peak (or idle) period is a good idea that can significantly increase the overall stability of your network. Until release 12.4, you had to write an external script that would log into the router and execute the reload command.

With the Embedded Event Manager, the task is surprisingly simple - just enter the following configuration commands to reload the box every midnight (of course it helps if your router is NTP-synchronized to a reliable clock source and has correctly configured time zone).

event manager  applet Reload
event timer cron name Reload cron-entry  "@midnight"
action 1.0 reload

The @midnight is a predefined symbolic value for "0 0 * * *". Of course you can use any other value that the UNIX cron utility would recognize as valid first five fields (time specification; username and command line are obviously not used).