Marcos Leão asked:

> How to configure hardware watchdog timer?
>
> Scenario:
>
> -Dell PowerEdge R710
> -iDRAC6
> -RHEL 5.5, freeipmi, ipmitool
>   


ipmitool doesn't have anything useful for managing setting the hardware
watchdog timer, but FreeIPMI has the bmc-watchdog command.


If you are thinking about using watchdog timers on your system to
automatically recover from hardware lockups and the like, I recommend
that you look into the watchdog RPM (watchdog-5.6.1 is in the RHEL 5.5
repositories) - this allows both configuring hardware watchdog timer as
well as performing software tests that detect hard-to-recover-from
situations like severe memory depletion.  You can also write your own
tests, which I did for network misconfiguration, e.g. ifconfig down can
make not only the main system inaccessible, but also the BMC (or DRAC,
if it is using shared NIC rather than dedicated).


The one gotcha is that watchdog's built-in reboot functionality does an
ifdown on all interfaces, which could leave the BMC/DRAC unreachable - I
bypassed that by having the handler stop the watchdog daemon, leading to
a hardware reset when the watchdog timer finally expires.


@alex

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