forum.pistar.uk

For about 5 months I have been running Pi-Star 4.1.2 with System Cron:

30 2 * * 0 root /sbin/shutdown -r now #Reboot Sunday at 02:30 AM

As a result it has successfully rebooted every Sunday morning at 02:30 AM, except this past Sunday, when daylight savings time ended at 2 AM for the season. What appears to have happened was it shutdown, but did not restart. I had to manually power cycle it, which is inconvenient due to our restricted access to the commercial location where we are a guest.

I don't know cron well enough to know if this could be related to daylight savings time fall back or just an amazing coincidence.

I have changed the command to:

30 1 * * 0 root /sbin/shutdown -r now #Reboot Sunday at 01:30 AM

As such the reboot will run 30 minutes before the time change, in March and November. It might make a difference.

I use ZeroTier to permit remote access to the STM32-MMDVM controller. ZeroTier reports the disconnection, and it was approximately at the daylight savings time change. I prefer to reboot automatically, and have been doing so for over 5 months without issue at 2:30 AM Sundays.

I have changed the system cron entry to:

30 1 * * 0 root /sbin/shutdown -r now # Reboot Sunday at 01:30 AM

As a result the reboot should occur 30 minutes before the twice a year time change. Will it make a difference? It will be a long time, March and November 2021, for the test.

System Cron uses the system time setting you have chosen. You can select UTC should you wish. The crontab contains actions to occur at 03:25, 03:47 and 03:52 system time. If you chose UTC, and were in the Pacific Time Zone, these actions would actually occur at 19:25, 19:47 and 19:52 PST. That might be undesirable. I would suggest selecting a system time setting corresponding to your location.

With respect to using the system cron to reboot. I temporarily set my spare STM32-DVM running Pi-Star code to reboot hourly. I ran this 4 days, about 100 reboots without issue. I have currently set this line in the crontab:

1 0 * * 0 root /sbin/shutdown -r now # Reboot at 00:01 Sunday morning

This avoids any daylight savings time issue, even if imaginary, and results in a reboot once a week at an appropriate time.

The reboot takes 40 seconds.