What is correct way to enable watchdog?

[Peter Steele]

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

So -e has to be provided for the system to reboot? That doesn't seem to jive with our experience. When we first enabled the watchdog, we just went with the defaults--no -e command. The default for the timeout is 16 seconds. We started getting reboots regularly until we increased this value. We decided we didn't need anything as agressive as 16 seconds and went instead with 300 seconds. We still see the reboots, but nowhere near as frequently. 

>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. 

Okay, we'll enable dumpdev/dumpdir and see what we get. 

With 300 seconds though, a system would have to be truly dead before a reboot should occur. But our own application logs show that only four minutes elapsed from the last log we recorded to the first log we recorded after the reboot. Considering it takes 2-3 minutes for a system to boot and our application to start running after the boot, I would think we should see a span of at least 7 minutes in our logs where nothing is recorded. However, the span is only about 4 minutes, which is more or less the same as we'd get if someone went by the box and hit the reset button. So it doesn't look like the watchdog is behaving properly.