A working watchdog API

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <20030731002304.GA5131 at edgemaster.zombie.org>, Sean Kelly writes:

>Comments? Ideas? Questions? Death threats?

Looks good to me.

I tacitly assume that (something like) the <sys/watchdog.h> interface
will remain for userland components to "take over" the patting of
the watchdog.

One thing we may want to consider is to write a configurable userland
watchdogd process which will examine various vital statistics and
pat the watchdog if everything is fine.

Amongst the things I could imagine watchdogd looking at:
	Precense of carrier on network interfaces
	A certain minimum amount of trafic on an interface
	Ping'ability of a given IP#
	Being able to connect to a given tcp port.
	A given process still running.
	Being able to create, write, fsync, close and remove a given file
	(to see that a disk is not hung).
etc.

Any takes ?

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.