Iain Buchanan wrote: > On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 12:42 -0400, Steven Lembark wrote: >>> I tried ALT + SysRq + EISUB today on my MythTV backend server which >>> has been crashing lately. Unfortunately it's crashing so badly that >>> even at the server's keyboard this didn't work. >>> >>> I guess my weekend fate of building a new server is sealed... >> Have fun. >> >> Check out motherboards with watchdog capability >> and enable it in the kernel. > > watchdogs are nice, and linux makes them ultra-easy to program, but of > course if your watchdog task dies, then the machine effectively hits the > reset button for you - no nice shutdown whatsoever! (Which is what you > want in a hard lock-up, but not if your programming skills are the cause > of the problem :)
- Have the system turn off the watchdog if the file is closed. - After that just open it and poke a bit out now and then. - Make a point of closing the file on exit. #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; open my $fh, '<', '/path/to/watchdog/file' or die "Failed opening watchdog file: $!"; # watchdog is now watching... select $fh; for(;;) { print "\n"; sleep 1; # watchdog timeout / 2 } my $graceful_exit = sub { close $fh; exit 0 }; for sig in ( qw( TERM QUIT INT __DIE__ ) ) { $SIG{ $sig } = $graceful_exit; } for sig in ( qw( HUP ) ) { $SIG{ $SIG } = 'IGNORE'; } __END__ -- Steven Lembark 85-09 90th St. Workhorse Computing Woodhaven, NY, 11421 [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1 888 359 3508 -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list