Need to auto reboot switch (or ports) each morning

[Jerry Heath]

       I am using a SF300-24 switch with 12 POE WiFi access points in a residence hall.  Occasionally, an AP's signal will get so weak users are unable to associate their phones or laptops with it.  Disabling the relevant port remotely for a minute or so (effectively rebooting the AP) almost always cures the situation.   My questions are:   

1. Is the cause of the weakened signal a function of the individual AP (we use Cisco Aironet 1142N's, 1602i's and 1602e's) or is it "caused" by the switch?

2.  Is there a way to reboot the switch at a specified time in the early-morning hours each day to be proactive about this ?  I'm thinking a system "refresh" might prevent or minimize the user interruptions.

3.  If the switch itself cannot be rebooted on a schedule each morning, could someone provide me with examples of how to use the switch's Time Range and Recurring Range feature to reboot the individual ports on a daily schedule?  I have experimented with this timer function but, so far, have been unable to configure it correctly.

Thanks for any help you can send my way.

[Prithvi Manduva]

Hi Jerry Heath,

Can you increase the power Priority Level under Port Management > PoE > Settings and see if it helps in the signal strength.

If your router is connected to a pc physically  you can write a script to login to the device and reload it.

Thanks,
Prithvi

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[Tom Watts]

Hi, on the switch you should be able to set a pre-emptive reboot such as

reload at 23:59

This will reboot the switch at 23 hours 59 minutes. Make sure your system clock is configured.

-Tom
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[Jerry Heath]

Thank you, Tom, for the suggestion.  Will the command above automatically reboot the switch each day at 23:59 without me having to do anything manually?

Jerry

[Jerry Heath]

Thank you, Prithvi, for your reply.  I never know which AP will go offline, it is different ones all the time.  I would like to set up some kind of automatic schedule so that the switch (or all the AP's) is rebooted each morning at the same time without me having to do it manually each day.  Would it do any good to set the Power Level to High on all the ports in use (12 AP's, 12 ports being used)?

Jerry

[Jerry Heath]

I'm also having some trouble telnetting into the switch.  I always get "connection refused" after I enter the IP address.  I have set up "admin" for the access profile.  Do I need to do anything else?

[Tom Watts]

security -> tcp/udp services -> check telnet

-Tom
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[Jerry Heath]

Thanks. I can telnet into the switch now but the "reload" command has no sub-commands; it will not take "reload at 23:59".

Jerry

[viningele]

What you could try is go to admin > Time Settings > Time Range and create a time range from immediate to the last year available in the drop down 2097.  Name it Daily Midnight or something.

Then go to Recurring Range and modify Daily Midnight by adding recurring start and end times for each day of the week.

MON,0:0:0 - 23:59:00

TUES,0:0:0 - 23:59:00

etc, to Sunday

Then go to Port Management > Port Settings select one of your POE AP ports > edit and under the Time Range setting enter "Daily Midnight".

I haven't really tested this but in theory it should de-activate the ports set to "Daily Midnight" for 1 minute every night and I would think on a POE port that would mean power is also interrupted which would affectively reboot your APs.  Obviously if this does work you can shift the de-activated period and duration to better suit your needs.

[Jerry Heath]

I have tried different configurations of the Time Settings/Time Range commands and nothing seems to effect the status of the POE port, it doesn't go "down" at the specified time.  First I tried using the 0:0:0 - 23:59:00 uptime schedules and that did not reboot the port.  Then I tried the reverse, a recurring time setting of 4:00-4:06 downtime setting and that had no effect on the status of the port either.  It's hard to believe Cisco hasn't designed an easy way to accomplish this relatively uncomplicated and valuable task in this Small Business Switch.

Thanks to everyone who has responded but, so far, I'm dealing with the same issues without a solution in sight.

[viningele]

If you can't figure a way with the switch you have there's always 3rd party devices like:

http://www.digital-loggers.com/poe48.html

That I like to use.  I also use their 120v rack mount PDU:

http://www.digital-loggers.com/epcr3.htm

on most jobs so there's little I can't remotely do or do through programs I write for AMX control systems.

Unfortunately my bench SG500-28 is powered down and it doesn't have POE ports to test on anyway.