On Tuesday 03 August 2004 18:21, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > Frans Ketelaars wrote: > > On Tuesday 03 August 2004 15:01, Mark Rogers wrote: > > > Hi Team > > > > > > Thanks to all those who have given invaluable help over the last > > > few weeks. One last item (for the moment) that I need to do is > > > setup my system (which is always on) to reboot once a day. Im > > > doing this to ensure there are no problems while absent from the > > > machine for a couple of weeks. (And will be 10,000km from the > > > machine). The machine will not be logged on as 'root' and my > > > security limit is set pretty high (i.e. the reboot command needs > > > to be looged in as 'root' before it executes). Anyone have any > > > idea of how I should go about doing this? > > > > Slightly OT: you can easyly set up an old computer with an old > > modem to dial in to (or which has a permanent net connection) and > > let it powercycle the main machine when it has crashed. See > > http://www.telenovela-world.com/~spade/linux/howto/Coffee.html for > > details :-) > > > > -Frans > > Another way is to pick up a watchdog timer card, and let it reboot > the machine if it locks up. There are several that are supported > "out of the box" by the kernel, and it shouldn't be too hard to make > others work. There is also a software version, but it isn't as > dependable. It can not recover from a lockup inside a driver that > has interrupts turned off. The hardware versions do not suffer from > this limitation.
These watchdog timer cards are expensive though I think. They may be able to reboot the machine more subtly than a power cycle would, but I guess this depends on the kind of lock up and the capabilities of the card. You could also use an old (>= 386) computer to monitor the main machine by checking if it continually flips a bit on an unused parallel or serial port (with the main machine configured to do so) and after a timeout period power cycling the main machine. At least it would be cheap (hardware wise) ;-) > On the other hand, with the normal uptime for a Linux server measured > in months or years, it usually isn't needed... It has been years > since I locked up, or crashed a Linux system that wasn't caused by > hardware failing, loss of power, or by my exparmenting with something > as root that I knew was risky. (Playing with video modes for DOSumu, > new device driver, etc...) > > Mikkel -Frans
____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com ____________________________________________________