Does the power button corrupt the filesystem

My Archer C7 in the sleeping room is needed rarely, an AP (client-wds) is configured, but the master-wds can be reached too, less signal, but enough. The C7 is used to give a dvb-box a wifi-connection mainly or in other words to look some internet channels.

So I am asking, if it could harm the C7, if it is switched off by the power button daily? It doesn't look, that the power button executes a shutdown.

Potentially, yes, as the file system may be in the middle of a write.

Even with as expensive as electricity is for me, the roughly 4 W that an Archer C7 consumes for me is not enough to consider powering it down. 4 W * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * US$0.30 / kWH ~ US$10 / year.

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It is not a question of money, mainly I fear that wifi incluences sleeping and why not to shut down everything, when it is needed rarely.

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It doesn’t. It’s neither high enough wattage to harm you by dilectric heating nor is it high enough frequency to harm you by ionizing your cellular structures. It’s fine.

As right as Jeff is by stating that, in theory, turning off your router could corrupt the flash memory, it is extremely unlikely. By default, OpenWrt is designed to do as little writes to flash as possible, and if you don't actively configure something to write to flash on a regular basis it will run with practically no write operations. I don't think I'm sticking my neck out too far to say that you'll be fine just turning it off.

You can also tell your router to turn off the wifi on a schedule.

(You'd also have to tell all your neighbors to turn off their wifi, bluetooth devices, cordless phones, baby monitors, wireless headphones and wireless cameras. Also remind them not to use their microwaves.)

I am sleeping 2.5m (head) from the router away. I reduced the power already to 7 with no speed reduction. I don't care about devices, which are not so near and with walls in between.

At the moment I have troubles to get a wifi cronjob work, see here: Wifitoggle configuration with luci?

Maybe it is an idea to execute /sbin/halt with a cronjob. But as already said, I don't care so much about costs and probably there is no big difference between halt and wifi off, if nothing else is used.

When everything works, I need the C7 2 times a week.

If cron doesn't work out for you, there is a wireless switch on the back, though it is, as I recall, labeled "backwards" and it behaves strangely as it is "read" as a pushbutton, though it is a physical toggle.

The blinking visible lights can definitely be an issue. Just turn off the machine when you don't need it. Filesystem will be fine.

If it can't be done automatically, I prefer pressing the power button, but I think there have been bugs in my script. The commands in the script work now, which didn't before, so it is clear why the wifi was on. I will see in 1 day if it worked.

The Archer C7 doesn't blink (maybe it is default with openwrt), while the R7800 blinks horrible, but the R7800 has a button on the backside to switch it off, but I never tried it, as long as I am configuring the new routers. 1 R7800 is in the living room, so I don't care while sleeping. But maybe later I will put the LEDs off.

I am still thinking of using a cronjob with halt to switch off the router. Then it can be switched off with the power button without problems or not. It really depends how much I need the C7. The main task is to give wifi to the dvb-box and a tv with an ethernet-cable and not an access point for wireless devices.

Is it possible to reduce tx-power during night with a cronjob? Maybe this makes sense for my wds-master (R7800)

I was powering down my router for some month with a time switch and sometimes there were some missing files when newly written on an attached usb stick which I used rarely. The filesystem got repaired at startup without further problems except the missing files ;- )

iirc poweroff or halt results in an reboot of R7800

Why not also power off wifi at night with package wifischedule+luci-app-wifischedule? What I find very convinient is the fact that in default configuration as long as devices are connected/using wifi won't be shut down regardless the time set.

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OpenWrt is designed to write to the internal flash only when you change a configuration, install a package, etc. Once it is running steady not doing any of those things, you can simply switch it off.

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When I tried this, I found out, that internet with the routers (and only with them, not the clients) doesn:t work, In the meantime I am pretty sure, there is something wrong with the DNS and gateway-configuration. For a wireless bridge, DHCP has to be off and there is only 1 DHCP-server allowed, which is not an openwrt-server, but a Fritzbox. I can get everything work depending on the configuration, but not at the same time. Maybe someone can help here: No internet connection from the router via ssh from time to time - #3

Don't forget users which have attached storage USB sticks, HDD, SSD

no problem, I also have a Archer C7 (v4), it works very well but the range is low, I replaced it with MI WIFI R3 (OpenWrt NATCAP)

In the meantime I solved my network problem, which leaded to a wrong time and not working cronjobs because the router used a wrong time.

root@C7v5-B:~# opkg list-installed | grep wifischedule
wifischedule - 1-2

Looks like this is nothing else, than "crontab -e" in a browser? Or does it more?

I want that the wifi is on, when the router boots, nevertheless the state was before. Since this is a wireless bridge, this is the easiest thing to have access again, otherwise I need a notebook and a cable to edit the configuration.strong text