I am working on an application project on Debian Linux which involves software watchdog to monitors other services by PID file created by services.
I am following the steps from http://linux.die.net/man/5/watchdog.conf and installed it by
apt-get install watchdog
The mechanism behind is that watchdog checks these PID files existence those are configured in /etc/watchdog,conf file.
I have tested it by stopping any service by service service-name stop
Watchdog will detect that service is not in running state hence it reboot the system after some seconds equal to watchdog timeout period.
Consider we have a display less product then it would rebooting the system infinite time without any intimation to end user in case of a service's configuration files are corrupted etc.
The practical expectation is that before taking action by watchdog for reboot/halt/soft-restart I am want to know the status of watchdog so that programmer can implement intimation logic for end user.
Otherwise can it possible to modify watchdog init script in /etc/init.d/ to call user program on stopping the software watchdog so that programmer will able to maintain a counter in non-volatile memory to avoid infinite time reboot.
Except above I want more about this software watchdog or watchdog daemon to get status. I have implemented it to monitor services, CPU overload, temperature etc but I am not getting any event before watchdog action hence I am not getting why the system restarting due to a service down, CPU overheat or CPU overload etc.
