Public bug reported: I was testing the watchdog daemon code on the development version of 16.04 today and found the associated systemd service files for this has some bugs.
The first of these was a typo in /lib/systemd/system/watchdog.service where there was a missing ['] character. This lead to an error message "Unbalanced quoting, ignoring" which was easy to fix. The update is now in the source-forge repository for the project as commit http://sourceforge.net/p/watchdog/code/ci/38e6430f80907a84741c760ef48df69a679b294c/ However, I have not found the reason for the second problem where the daemon has some fault at reboot time and goes in to "failed state" and then it will not restart with the machine booting. The typical related syslog entries are: Jan 19 16:46:08 ubuntu watchdog[2066]: stopping daemon (5.14) Jan 19 16:46:08 ubuntu systemd[1]: Stopping watchdog daemon... Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: watchdog.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1 Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: Stopped watchdog daemon. Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: watchdog.service: Unit entered failed state. Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: watchdog.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies. Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: watchdog.service: Failed to enqueue OnFailure= job: Resource deadlock avoided Jan 19 16:46:09 ubuntu systemd[1]: watchdog.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'. I am guessing this is related to the shut-down approach for the watchdog daemon where normally the wd_keepalive daemon is started afterwards (to prevent a reboot if the hardware module is configured for "no way out" so the timer cannot be stopped). $ lsb_release -rd Description: Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (development branch) Release: 16.04 $ apt-cache policy watchdog watchdog: Installed: 5.14-3 Candidate: 5.14-3 Version table: *** 5.14-3 500 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe i386 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status I have contacted the watchdog project maintainer with a view to working out a solution to this. This bug report is more of a marker to let folks know that there is an issue here if you plan on having high-availability servers based on Ubuntu 16.04 (well, any systemd based system really..) where watchdog-based fault recovery is an expectation. ** Affects: watchdog (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Package changed: rsyslog (Ubuntu) => watchdog (Ubuntu) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1535854 Title: watchdog daemon going in to failed state on reboot To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/watchdog/+bug/1535854/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs