Watchdog timer

[mike at sentex.ca]

On Sun, 24 May 2009 23:00:50 -0700, in sentex.lists.freebsd.questions
you wrote:

>What's the proper way to configure the watchdog timer service so that a
>system will automatically reboot after five minutes of
>non-responsiveness? I tried setting watchdog to run with the args "-s 10
>-t 300", but I've seen systems reboot after only a few seconds of
>inactivity (such as being hung on an I/O wait) instead of the full five
>minutes specified by the -t option. What am I missing?

It depends on the watchdog hardware itself. Some are not able to
handle long timeouts.  Check the man pages for the hardware you are
using.  The VIA hardware that we hacked a driver for said it could go
upto 512 seconds, but we could not get to that length

http://www.tancsa.com/watchdog/

	---Mike