Auto Restarting Magic Jack on Mac OS X

[wakundama]

magicJack at times needs to be restarted. So as a routine at times I would just restart magicJack just to keep it reliable. However, I recently figured out a way to get the Mac to have a background task auto restart it at regular intervals for me. You'll need to be comfortable with the Terminal and some Unix to do this. Here's what I did:

1) Create the a file with the following text:
# first kill any existing processes named magic jack
killall -9 magicJack

# next start up magicJack
/Users/proof/.magicJack/Softphone/magicJack.app/Contents/MacOS/magicJack &

2) save the file with a meaningful file name

3) do a chmod a+x to the file to make it executable.

4) Test execute your new script and watch it bring down and bring back up magic jack.

5) Download Crontooie for the Mac.

6) In Crontooie add a new row that will execute your new script and set the time you want it to go off.

7) Click save and quit Crontooie. This script is now part of you OS and is part of what's known as the Unix Crontab. If you are more a Unix diehard you actually don't need Crontooie and could manually edit the Crontab file instead.

[wakundama]

Ooops. My instructions are a bit off below. Instead of /Users/proof/.magicJack ....

What I really meant is:

/Users/[fill in your username here]/.magicJack/Softphone/magicJack.app/Contents/MacOS/magicJack &

So don't enter "proof" unless that is your user name. If your user name was for example "george" enter:

/Users/george/.magicJack/Softphone/magicJack.app/Contents/MacOS/magicJack &

1) Create the a file with the following text:
# first kill any existing processes named magic jack
killall -9 magicJack

# next start up magicJack
/Users/proof/.magicJack/Softphone/magicJack.app/Contents/MacOS/magicJack &

[Dalton63841]

Instead of downloading and using crontab, you could more easily use the built in iCal.

Make an event, and on alarm, choose "Run Script", point it to your script, and then set it to repeat daily, or weekly, etc...

Excellent script though. Very helpful!