WATCHDOG(8)WATCHDOG(8)NAMEwatchdog - a software watchdog daemon
SYNOPSISwatchdog [-f|--force] [-c filename|--config-file filename] [-v|--ver‐
bose] [-s|--sync] [-b|--softboot] [-q|--no-action]
DESCRIPTION
The Linux kernel can reset the system if serious problems are detected.
This can be implemented via special watchdog hardware, or via a
slightly less reliable software-only watchdog inside the kernel. Either
way, there needs to be a daemon that tells the kernel the system is
working fine. If the daemon stops doing that, the system is reset.
watchdog is such a daemon. It opens /dev/watchdog, and keeps writing to
it often enough to keep the kernel from resetting, at least once per
minute. Each write delays the reboot time another minute. After a
minute of inactivity the watchdog hardware will cause the reset. In the
case of the software watchdog the ability to reboot will depend on the
state of the machines and interrupts.
The watchdog daemon can be stopped without causing a reboot if the
device /dev/watchdog is closed correctly, unless your kernel is com‐
piled with the CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT option enabled.
TESTS
The watchdog daemon does several tests to check the system status:
· Is the process table full?
· Is there enough free memory?
· Are some files accessible?
· Have some files changed within a given interval?
· Is the average work load too high?
· Has a file table overflow occurred?
· Is a process still running? The process is specified by a pid file.
· Do some IP addresses answer to ping?
· Do network interfaces receive traffic?
· Is the temperature too high? (Temperature data not always avail‐
able.)
· Execute a user defined command to do arbitrary tests.
· Execute one or more test/repair commands found in /etc/watchdog.d.
These commands are called with the argument test or repair.
If any of these checks fail watchdog will cause a shutdown. Should any
of these tests except the user defined binary last longer than one
minute the machine will be rebooted, too.
OPTIONS
Available command line options are the following:
-v, --verbose
Set verbose mode. Only implemented if compiled with SYSLOG fea‐
ture. This mode will log each several infos in LOG_DAEMON with
priority LOG_INFO. This is useful if you want to see exactly
what happened until the watchdog rebooted the system. Currently
it logs the temperature (if available), the load average, the
change date of the files it checks and how often it went to
sleep.
-s, --sync
Try to synchronize the filesystem every time the process is
awake. Note that the system is rebooted if for any reason the
synchronizing lasts longer than a minute.
-b, --softboot
Soft-boot the system if an error occurs during the main loop,
e.g. if a given file is not accessible via the stat(2) call.
Note that this does not apply to the opening of /dev/watchdog
and /proc/loadavg, which are opened before the main loop starts.
-f, --force
Force the usage of the interval given or the maximal load aver‐
age given in the config file.
-c config-file, --config-file config-file
Use config-file as the configuration file instead of the default
/etc/watchdog.conf.
-q, --no-action
Do not reboot or halt the machine. This is for testing purposes.
All checks are executed and the results are logged as usual, but
no action is taken. Also your hardware card or the kernel soft‐
ware watchdog driver is not enabled. Temperature checking is
also disabled since this triggers the hardware watchdog on some
cards.
FUNCTION
After watchdog starts, it puts itself into the background and then
tries all checks specified in its configuration file in turn. Between
each two tests it will write to the kernel device to prevent a reset.
After finishing all tests watchdog goes to sleep for some time. The
kernel drivers expects a write to the watchdog device every minute.
Otherwise the system will be reset. As a default watchdog will sleep
for only 10 seconds so it triggers the device early enough.
Under high system load watchdog might be swapped out of memory and may
fail to make it back in in time. Under these circumstances the Linux
kernel will reset the machine. To make sure you won't get unnecessary
reboots make sure you have the variable realtime set to yes in the con‐
figuration file watchdog.conf. This adds real time support to watch‐
dog: it will lock itself into memory and there should be no problem
even under the highest of loads.
Also you can specify a maximal allowed load average. Once this load
average is reached the system is rebooted. You may specify maximal load
averages for 1 minute, 5 minutes or 15 minutes. The default values is
to disable this test. Be careful not to set this parameter too low. To
set a value less then the predefined minimal value of 2, you have to
use the -f option.
You can also specify a minimal amount of virtual memory you want to
have available as free. As soon as more virtual memory is used action
is taken by watchdog. Note, however, that watchdog does not distin‐
guish between different types of memory usage. It just checks for free
virtual memory.
If you have a watchdog card with temperature sensor you can specify the
maximal allowed temperature. Once this temperature is reached the sys‐
tem is halted. The default value is 120. There is no unit conversion so
make sure you use the same unit as your hardware. watchdog will issue
warnings once the temperature increases 90%, 95% and 98% of this tem‐
perature.
When using file mode watchdog will try to stat(2) the given files.
Errors returned by stat will not cause a reboot. For a reboot the stat
call has to last at least one minute. This may happen if the file is
located on an NFS mounted filesystem. If your system relies on an NFS
mounted filesystem you might try this option. However, in such a case
the sync option may not work if the NFS server is not answering.
watchdog can read the pid from a pid file and see whether the process
still exists. If not, action is taken by watchdog. So you can for
instance restart the server from your repair-binary.
watchdog will try periodically to fork itself to see whether the
process table is full. This process will leave a zombie process until
watchdog wakes up again and catches it; this is harmless, don't worry
about it.
In ping mode watchdog tries to ping the given IP addresses. These
addresses do not have to be a single machine. It is possible to ping to
a broadcast address instead to see if at least one machine in a subnet
is still living.
Do not use this broadcast ping unless your MIS person a) knows about it
and b) has given you explicit permission to use it!
watchdog will send out three ping packages and wait up to <interval>
seconds for the reply with <interval> being the time it goes to sleep
between two times triggering the watchdog device. Thus a unreachable
network will not cause a hard reset but a soft reboot.
You can also test passively for an unreachable network by just monitor‐
ing a given interface for traffic. If no traffic arrives the network is
considered unreachable causing a soft reboot or action from the repair
binary.
watchdog can run an external command for user-defined tests. A return
code not equal 0 means an error occured and watchdog should react. If
the external command is killed by an uncaught signal this is considered
an error by watchdog too. The command may take longer than the time
slice defined for the kernel device without a problem. However, error
messages are generated into the syslog facility. If you have enabled
softboot on error the machine will be rebooted if the binary doesn't
exit in half the time watchdog sleeps between two tries triggering the
kernel device.
If you specify a repair binary it will be started instead of shutting
down the system. If this binary is not able to fix the problem watchdog
will still cause a reboot afterwards.
If the machine is halted an email is sent to notify a human that the
machine is going down. Starting with version 4.4 watchdog will also
notify the human in charge if the machine is rebooted.
SOFT REBOOT
A soft reboot (i.e. controlled shutdown and reboot) is initiated for
every error that is found. Since there might be no more processes
available, watchdog does it all by himself. That means:
1. Kill all processes with SIGTERM.
2. After a short pause kill all remaining processes with SIGKILL.
3. Record a shutdown entry in wtmp.
4. Save the random seed from /dev/urandom. If the device is non-exis‐
tant or there is no filename for saving this step is skipped.
5. Turn off accounting.
6. Turn off quota and swap.
7. Unmount all partitions except the root partition.
8. Remount the root partition read-only.
9. Shut down all network interfaces.
10. Finally reboot.
CHECK BINARY
If the return code of the check binary is not zero watchdog will assume
an error and reboot the system. Be careful with this if you are using
the real-time properties of watchdog since watchdog will wait for the
return of this binary before proceeding. An positive exit code is
interpreted as an system error code (see errno.h for details). Negative
values are special to watchdog:
-1 Reboot the system. This is not exactly an error message but a
command to watchdog. If the return code is -1watchdog will not
try to run a shutdown script instead.
-2 Reset the system. This is not exactly an error message but a
command to watchdog. If the return code is -2watchdog will
simply refuse to write the kernel device again.
-3 Maximum load average exceeded.
-4 The temperature inside is too high.
-5 /proc/loadavg contains no (or not enough) data.
-6 The given file was not changed in the given interval.
-7 /proc/meminfo contains invalid data.
-8 Child process was killed by a signal.
-9 Child process did not return in time.
-10 Free for personal use.
REPAIR BINARY
The repair binary is started with one parameter: the error number that
caused watchdog to initiate the boot process. After trying to repair
the system the binary should exit with 0 if the system was successfully
repaired and thus there is no need to boot anymore. A return value not
equal 0 tells watchdog to reboot. The return code of the repair binary
should be the error number of the error causing watchdog to reboot. Be
careful with this if you are using the real-time properties since
watchdog will wait for the return of this binary before proceeding.
TEST DIRECTORY
Executables placed in the test directory are discovered by watchdog on
startup and are automatically executed. They are bounded time-wise by
the test-timeout directive in watchdog.conf.
These executables are called with either "test" as the first argument
(if a test is being performed) or "repair" as the first argument (if a
repair for a previously-failed "test" operation on is being performed).
The as with test binaries and repair binaries, expected exit codes for
a successful test or repair operation is always zero.
If an executable's test operation fails, the same executable is auto‐
matically called with the "repair" argument as well as the return code
of the previously-failed test operation.
For example, if the following execution returns 42:
/etc/watchdog.d/my-test test
The watchdog daemon will attempt to repair the problem by calling:
/etc/watchdog.d/my-test repair 42
This enables administrators and application developers to make intelli‐
gent test/repair commands. If the "repair" operation is not required
(or is not likely to succeed), it is important that the author of the
command return a non-zero value so the machine will still reboot as
expected.
Note that the watchdog daemon may interpret and act upon any of the
reserved return codes noted in the Check Binary section prior to call‐
ing a given command in "repair" mode.
BUGS
None known so far.
AUTHORS
The original code is an example written by Alan Cox
<alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, the author of the kernel driver. All addi‐
tions were written by Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org>. Johnie Ingram
<johnie@netgod.net> had the idea of testing the load average. He also
took over the Debian specific work. Dave Cinege <dcinege@psychosis.com>
brought up some hardware watchdog issues and helped testing this stuff.
FILES
/dev/watchdog
The watchdog device.
/var/run/watchdog.pid
The pid file of the running watchdog.
SEE ALSOwatchdog.conf(5)4th Berkeley Distribution January 2005 WATCHDOG(8)
