Re: [Ipmitool-devel] New ipmi watchdog daemon

[Carol H. <ca...@us...>]

Hi Corey,

Thanks again to everyone who sent the excellent pointers to existing
watchdog daemons.  Two of the daemons at the ibiblio.org site (URL
below) seemed to do everything I was hoping for (and more :-).  The
watchdog and wd_keepalive daemons seem to work very well with the
ipmi_watchdog driver with the exception that they do not allow for a
clean/expected shutdown of the timer upon close.  Neither daemon writes
the "V" character to the ipmi_watchdog driver to signal it to expect a
close and to shut off the timer without triggering it.  Unfortunately,
removing the ipmi_watchdog module also does not shut off the timer.  A
raw ipmitool command can be sent subsequent to killing the daemon to
shut off the timer (ipmitool -v raw 0x06 0x24 0x04 0x01 0x00 0x10 0x00
0x0a) but it would probably be better to have the timer shut off
automatically while performing a "service ipmi stop-watchdog".

What do you think would be the best approach to having the timer shut
off cleanly when the watchdog daemon is killed intentionally on an
otherwise healthy system?

Thanks much for your help,

Carol Hebert

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 19:17 -0500, Corey Minyard wrote:
> Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> > Dmitry Frolov writes:
> > | * Carol Hebert <ca...@us...> [12.08.2006 07:25]:
> > | > I'm looking into what it would take to write a watchdog daemon and am
> > | > trying to put together a list of requirements.  I guess the first thing
> > | > I need to know is whether anyone else is currently working on an ipmi
> > | > watchdog daemon?  If anyone on this mailing list is currently working on
> > | > such a daemon, please let me know.
> > | > 
> > | > The next question is (assuming an ipmi watchdog daemon isn't already in
> > | > the works by someone): where would be the best place for such a daemon
> > | > to reside?  I think that including it with ipmitool might be the right
> > | > place, since that's where ipmievd lives.  Please let me know if you
> > | > disagree and feel it belongs in the OpenIPMI library or elsewhere
> > | > instead.
> > | > 
> > | > I thought I'd also start discussing requirements and let those in this
> > | > forum help decide what are the correct set of features/functionality.
> > | > Please respond if you have any comments/opinions/questions on any of
> > | > these points or if you have others you would like to have added to the
> > | > list.
> > | 
> > | Not that I know if anyone working on this, but here is FreeBSD's
> > | watchdogd that can be used as a sample for watchdog daemon
> > | functionality:
> > | 
> > | http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/usr.sbin/watchdogd/watchdogd.c
> >
> > FWIW, the FreeBSD OpenIPMI like driver connects into the generic kernel
> > watchdog so this just works under FreeBSD with watchdogd.  So nothing
> > has to be done except to use watchdogd.
> >   
> The same is true for the Linux IPMI watchdog driver.  It works just like
> any other watchdog in the kernel except it has boot-time configuration
> (and for newer 2.6 kernels, configuration through sysfs).  This is
> documented in the Documentation/IPMI.txt file.  There is already a Linux
> watchdog daemon at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/daemons/watchdog; it is fairly
> thorough.
> 
> -Corey