Re: [Ipmitool-devel] Watchdog commands

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

On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 08:45 -0700, Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> Audet, Jean-Michel writes:
> | Are we OK if I patch IPMITool in the CVS.
> 
> Patch it.  There are probably some OS's that don't have it built into
> the driver.  It won't conflict unless people try to do both at once.  
> We might want to add a note that they should use the driver provided 
> watchdog if available.
> 
> Doug A.
> 

Hi,

I'd like to review this patch a bit further (and longer) before
committing it to CVS (oops, too late :-( .   I personally have some
concerns about it and I also think it would be good to give others on
ipmitool-devel the chance to weigh in on it.

The OpenIPMI driver currently provides an excellent in-band interface
for the watchdog.  Additionally, there is an excellent watchdog daemon
(a project on sourceforge) which can be set up to be used as a hardware
watchdog with the OpenIPMI driver (actually, there are probably many
other suitable daemons as well that can be used with IPMI).

Regarding out-of-band watchdog manipulation, of course it's not a good
idea for a remote machine to be made responsible for resetting a
watchdog timer on any another machine.  I believe it would be helpful
for there to be some accompanying documentation/warning about usage of
these commands in such a manner.  For the machine to use its own out of
band interface, IMHO, there needs to be some accompanying documentation
on how to set up/write a keepalive daemon for use with the ipmitool
reset command, and maybe some warnings along with the timer
setup/startup command on what will happen if a daemon isn't started in
time.  The ipmitool man page would probably be a great place to
elaborate on usage warnings and instructions.

One thing ipmitool does need (and has needed for awhile), I believe, is
a command to turn off the watchdog timer gracefully.  AFAIK, this
functionality is currently only available in ipmitool via the raw
command interface.  It appears to me that the set command in the patch
does not allow for a timer shutdown.  I think there needs to be a
command interface or help-type/usage documentation on how to turn the
timer off.

Anyway, hope this is helpful and sparks (not flame-type sparks
hopefully ;-) more discussion.  

Thanks,

Carol Hebert