watchdog: hw+sw?

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009 07:19:34 -0700 (PDT) Doug Ambrisko
<ambrisko at ambrisko.com> wrote:

> We start watchdogd manually with our own rc.d script mainly since
> I noticed Dell pe2650's do false triggers :-(  Also I wanted to check 
> that our app. is functioning so we'd need to start after that.  It 
> would be good to add flags option to the stock start-up scripts. 
> Just having watchdogd running without checking on anything real tends
> to be useless since it is usually swapped in and can run just fine
> without depending on much of the system.

In the mean time I noticed that the watchdogd can be started with flags
just by adding
     watchdogd_flags="..."
to rc.conf.

So I just needed to write a shell script which checks the disks which
cause problems sometimes, and add a line to rc.conf and now I'm
satisfied (... but this should be documented somewhere more obvious).

For your app watching stuff, why not write a shell script which checks
for a file in a mfs which the app-start creates (if the file is there
and the pid not, the app died), and let the WD run this script. This way
you can use the default start script.

Bye,
Alexander.