Watchdog

Linux Watchdog

Watchdog is a daemon that monitors the health of a system and its processes and can restart them if they are not responding.

Hardware Device

• Applies to physical machines such as Raspberry Pi
• Steps below target Debian based systems such as Ubuntu using the apt package manager
  • Adjust as required for other package managers and distributions

1. Enable hardware watchdog

    sudo su
    echo 'dtparam=watchdog=on' >> /boot/config.txt
    reboot
   

2. Install watchdog service

    sudo apt-get install watchdog
   

3. Configure the watchdog
   • Edit /etc/watchdog.conf
   • Changes can be customer as required

     • Common base values I use

         # These values will hopefully never reboot your machine during normal use
         # (if your machine is really hung, the loadavg will go much higher than 25)
         max-load-1              = 24
         max-load-5              = 18
         max-load-15             = 12
       
         watchdog-device = /dev/watchdog
         watchdog-timeout = 15 # seconds
       
         temperature-sensor      = /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
         temperature-device      = /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
         max-temperature = 90
       

     • Add network interface monitoring

         # Check and ensure network is up
         interface               = eth0
       

     • Add memory monitoring

         # Note that this is the number of pages!
         # To get the real size, check how large the pagesize is on your machine.
         min-memory              = 50000 # 200 MB
         allocatable-memory      = 10000 # 40 MB
       

     • Example process/PID monitor

         # Monitoring system processes including PiHole related processes
         # Set by Graham Watts on 2021-05-27
         pidfile    = /var/run/pihole-FTL.pid
         pidfile    = /var/run/lighttpd.pid
         pidfile    = /var/run/sshd.pid
       

4. Enable the service

    sudo systemctl enable watchdog
    sudo systemctl start watchdog
    sudo systemctl status watchdog
   

Taken from: https://diode.io/raspberry%20pi/running-forever-with-the-raspberry-pi-hardware-watchdog-20202/

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