Just wondering if there's any consensus on the use of watchdogs. I just locked up my box playing with yet another fun freshly-downloaded soundapp from sourceforge... (amsynth in this case, but I've seen lockups many many times before). Let's face it, it ain't hard to freeze the box and kill the keyboard when you're running as root with realtime priority. The "Magic SysReq" keys are useless if you get no response from the keyboard...
It's not as scary as it used to be now that I use journalling filesystems, so I can reboot real quick and not corrupt my data. But still, it sucks to have to power down to get out of anything. So, what do we do? Watchdog? In hardware or software? Seems intuitive to me that a hardware watchdog would be the most reliable, but I haven't looked into it. What's a good one, and what do they cost? -- Paul Winkler home: http://www.slinkp.com "Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"
