watchdog

The watchdog program can be used as a powerful software watchdog daemon or may be alternately used with a hardware watchdog device such as the IPMI hardware watchdog driver interface to a resident Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). watchdog periodically writes to /dev/watchdog; the interval between writes to /dev/watchdog is configurable through settings in the watchdog config file. This configuration file is also used to set the watchdog to be used as a hardware watchdog instead of its default software watchdog operation. In either case, if the device is open but not written to within the configured time period, the watchdog timer expiration will trigger a machine reboot. When operating as a software watchdog, the ability to reboot will depend on the state of the machine and interrupts. When operating as a hardware watchdog, the machine will experience a hard reset (or whatever action was configured to be taken upon watchdog timer expiration) initiated by the BMC.

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