[mythtv-users] Need ideas for auto-recovery of locked up backend

[Craig Huff]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> System watchdog?
> Quite a lot of ordinary motherboards have hardware watchdogs built in, for example the w83627 and similar chips that provide hardware monitoring (voltages, temperature, fan speeds, etc). This can provide a last-resort method of rebooting a sick server if you don't have lights-out support, but only SSH access.
> With Linux you can add the corresponding watchdog driver module (they are black-listed by default in Ubuntu) and then the watchdog daemon and configure it to check a few vital signs. Typically you would check the load averages are not stupidly high (say over 5 per CPU core), maybe that rsyslogd is running, that you can run a simple bash script, etc.
> If any of those tests fail then you get a moderately orderly reboot, and the hardware watchdog makes sure you get a reboot even if there is a kernel panic style of fault. Brutal perhaps, but it gets the system back up and hopefully either all OK again or at least you can SSH in to fix it.

Any idea how to detect if/which hardware watchdog timer is present on
a particular motherboard (FWIW, the one I'm particularly interested in
is the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium that my BE is running on.)?

Craig