What is correct way to enable watchdog?

[Mel]

On Tuesday 24 February 2009 05:25:36 Peter Steele wrote:
> >No, meaning, if a system is unresponsive for 300 seconds, action will be
> >taken. watchdogd will not prevent proper reboots, panics or power
> > failures.
>
> Bad wording on my part. What you said is what I meant, and I assume the
> default action is to reboot the system?

If -e cmd is not specified, the daemon will
     perform a trivial file system check instead.

> >Panic, or overheating. Check the dumpdev/dumpdir variables in rc.conf(5).
>
> We don't have dumpdev/dumpdir configured in rc.conf. I'll do that. What
> makes us suspicious is that we have been running this stress test on
> systems for months without any reboots. We then enable the 300 second
> watchdog and two systems spontaneously reboot. We've turned it off again
> and have restarted the stress test and so far no reboots. What we want to
> know is are these reboots occurring as a result of a watchdog reboot? Is
> any kind of system log created when the watchdog reboots a system?

This smells more like a bug in watchdog. If that's the case, the crash dumps 
should point right at it, at which point I'd take it to freebsd-stable 
or -current, whichever applies to the OS version.

-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.