RBR50 intermittent DNS lookup issues

I have been experiencing internet connectivity issues and initially thought it was my DSL.  After troubleshooting and researching online I used telnet to connect to my Orbi and discovered that dnsmasq was not running which explained why DNS lookups were not running on my system.

As a workaround I created a cron task to run a bash script which uses the ps command to check whether dnsmasq is running and forces a restart if it is not running. 

The steps I performed are outlined below:  

1. Enable telnet mode using http://X.X.X.X/debug.htm where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the Orbi router.

2. Telnet into the Orbi router.

3. Create the bash script using the following command:

    echo 'DNSSTAT=`ps|grep -c dnsmasq`' >/tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh
    echo 'if [ $DNSSTAT == 1 ]' >>/tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh
    echo 'then' >>/tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh  
    echo '/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart' >>/tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh
    echo 'fi' >>/tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh

4. Make the bash script executable using the following command:
    chmod +x /tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh

5. Create a cron job to run the batch file ever minute using the following command:
    echo '* * * * * /tmp/dnsmasq-test.sh' >>/tmp/etc/crontabs/root

The above steps should force the dmsmasq process to reload and should keep DNS outages down to a couple of minutes until a better or permanent fix becomes available.

Please note that changes to the configuration or reboots of the router will require reapplication of the workaround.