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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Ipmitool-devel mailing list Ipmitool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipmitool-devel
