I have a Raspberry Pi 3B that has been running Volumio for a couple of years through various versions of the OS. I use it exclusively as a DLNA renderer. The biggest issue I’ve had is stability when idle. If I don’t use the machine for a few days in a row, which is common, it becomes unresponsive and I have to unplug it and replug it in to reboot it.
I don’t know if it is a hardware issue or network issue or a problem in the OS, but I finally took some time to set up a cron job to reboot the machine in the middle of the night every night. This is a heavy-handed solution but in the couple of months since I made the change I’ve only had to reboot it manually once. A huge improvement.
I’m new at a lot of this–I didn’t know what cron even was–so I’m documenting this here for other newbies (and for myself in the future if I ever need to do it again).
- Enable SSH here: ipaddress/dev
- Download PuTTY on my Windows machine.
- Connect PuTTY to ipaddress with username and password volumio.
- sudo nano /etc/crontab
- Enter password again.
- Down arrow to the lowest hash (#). ENTER to lower it, then up arrow to edit between them.
- Add the following line: 00 8 * * * root reboot
- CTL-X to exit, then Y to save changes and ENTER to accept default file name.
The 00 8 at the beginning of the new line sets the time of the reboot at 0800. When I was testing the reboot code, I first set the reboot to just a few minutes ahead of the current time, which is how I discovered that my Pi with Volumio isn’t set to my current timezone; it’s on Universal Time. Rather than figure out how to change the timezone, I just set it to reboot at 0800 UT, which is the middle of the night here.
I haven’t upgraded Volumio since I made this change; I’m not sure if it will be wiped out on upgrade.
Anyway, leaving here for others or for suggestions of other ways to deal with the problem.