Re: Watchdog

[Giacomo Mulas <gmulas@ca.astro.it>]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Francesco Pietra wrote:

> As I am going to install Debian amd64 (either lenny or etch) for purely
> numeric calculations (no X system), I wonder whether it would be better
> to disable hardware watchdog. On dual socket systems I never managed to
> install Debain amd64 software watchdog. Is any advantage in activating
> either hardware or software watchdog for such use?

Ciao Francesco. Having a watchdog in your case is useful if (and only if)
that machine is going to be (physically) in a somewhat hard to access place.
In that case, if something, anything hangs your computer so badly that you
would need to physically reboot it, the watchdog will do it for you (and in
most cases you will then be able to access the box remotely, unless
something really bad happened). If you have easy physical access to the
machine, so that in case of need you can just go to next room and push the
reset button, you probably don't need the watchdog for the intended use of
your machine.

Have fun,
Giacomo

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Giacomo Mulas <gmulas@ca.astro.it>
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