VMWare Data Recovery 1.2 – schedule weekly reboot

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?

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

Check more discussion of this question.

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