NetNeanderthal [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: >> I finally got my hands on one of these beasts after seeing it 'supported' by someone on the m0n0wall forums (circa 2003) and decided to see what it takes to upgrade its hardware and retrofit it with a modern operating system -- OpenBSD of course. I'm providing this eMail as a bit of a prod for some extra information as well as to share my extrapolations to a publicly archived list. <<
<snip> >> Now, to address an oddity that others have reported -- the watchdog circuit. I have NOT cut my watchdog circuit and have installed OpenBSD on 3 of these units so far. There is an apm0 device, but I'm not sure if it does much. There is not a watchdog device recognized by OpenBSD, nor are any of the sysctls for it set. My units do not reboot after 2 minutes -- in fact, some have been operating for days. Might anyone have an explanation for the phenom? << In general terms, a watchdog is a hardware device that resets the CPU if it's not "kicked" regularly e.g. every few hundred milliseconds. It should not be disableable in software; i.e. the code "going off in the weeds" should not be able to disable the watchdog by accident. An embedded circuit running proprietary software from boot time can meet these requirements. However, in my experience PC-type boards with watchdogs (e.g. PC/104 boards) have a software-enabled watchdog. This is off by default, meaning that a standard OS can boot and run. It's conventional to allow the watchdog to be enabled under software control, so that a critical application can enable the device once running. Again in general terms, it makes little sense for the OS itself to kick the watchdog, since this does not prove that the application is running and in control. I emphasize that these are general observations which may or may not be relevant to your platform. HTH, Steve http://www.fivetrees.com
