On Tuesday 03 August 2004 12:40 pm, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > The device you are talking about is a watchdog timer. They are > available for a lot of different systems. You can get one on a ISA or > PCI card for a PC as well. They used to be built-in on the Sparc > Stations. There is support for them in the Linux kernel. For anything > that a cron job reboot would work for, the software watchdog module for > the kernel should also handle. I am not sure how it would handle a > kernel panic. You need the hardware version to handle a hardware lockup.
Neither am I. I did do some looking around because it should be theoretically possible to trigger an UPS to cut and then restart power to its devices which would force a hard reboot to a locked machine but I never found anything other than the device I mentioned for Mac's and those were limited to their software since they have to tie in and monitor a specific process. I might look into it a little more because, although my own server is not really critical, I would like to have something that would force the reboot if it locks hard. I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult, you could simply run an agent to send a report to the device, if the report doesn't arrive, it forces a reboot but it would need to be factored into the power supply and if you use a UPS, that might be problematic. > > It would be interesting to know how many Linux systems run for months > with only remote logins to the machine. How often do you actually use a > keyboard and monitor to work on a server? (How many servers are running > without a keyboard or monitor?) I used to run mine that way but after several kernel upgrades caused issues (mostly related to kernel modules that need to be built against the new kernel after installing the new kernel), I finally figured I would splurge for a KVM for just such occasions. -- Bryan Phinney
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