Checking and Restarting a Modem

My ISP is less than reliable so I decided to automate my modem restarts. I’m using a Motorola SB6141 and I can access a web based interface at 192.168.100.1.

Using a combination of curl, grep, and sed, I was able to scrape the necessary pages to get information about the modem’s status. The script then checks the status and restarts the modem if it detects a fault. The script uses curl to GET a specific URL with the necessary parameters. This GET request triggers the modem’s restart.

That line looks like this:

curl -m 5 -s $HOST/reset.htm?reset_modem="Restart Cable Modem" &> /dev/null

It uses the following arguments:

• -m - Sets the max time for the curl command. This is so the script doesn’t hang.
• -s - Silences a portion of curl’s output.
• &> /dev/null - Redirects all remaining output to /dev/null.

You can find the script in this GitHub repository. Hope this works for you as well. Automate all the things!