Watchdog daemon doesn’t start at boot

init-scriptraspberry piraspbiansystemdwatchdog

I'm using a Raspberry Pi B, with Raspbian.
After upgrading to Jessie, watchdog daemon doesn't start at boot anymore. Starting it manually using "sudo service watchdog start" does work.
I tried:

purging and reinstalling watchdog
update-rc.d watchdog defaults && update-rc.d watchdog enable
systemctl enable watchdog produces this error:

The unit files have no [Install] section. They are not meant to be enabled using systemctl.

I checked

syslog with systemd verbosity on debug, no results. Other than the watchdog device nothing is mentioned.
systemctl list-units | grep -i watchdog is emtpy (unless I started it manually)
My default runlevel is 5 and the priority of watchdog in /etc/rc5.d/ is also 5.

What else can I try?

Best Answer

Open

/lib/systemd/system/watchdog.service

and add

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Systemd needs the [Install]-Section for a Unit to know how it should enable/disable the Unit.

Related Solutions

Linux watchdog and systemd watchdog

Systemd's watchdog can be mainly used for 3 different actions:

hardware reset (leveraging the CPU hardware watchdog exposed at /dev/watchdog). This is enabled by the RuntimeWatchdogSec= option in /etc/systemd/system.conf
application reset, as long as this is foreseen in the systemd unit definition
system reset as a fallback measure in response to multiple unsuccessful application resets. Also defined in the systemd unit

example unit file:

[Unit]
Description=My Little Daemon
Documentation=man:mylittled(8)

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mylittled
WatchdogSec=30s
Restart=on-failure
StartLimitInterval=5min
StartLimitBurst=4
StartLimitAction=reboot-force

The example is taken from: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/watchdog.html, which gives a pretty complete overview of what and how you can use the watchdog service.

Linux – Error codes for watchdog daemon

Yes, per the same manual page:

TEST BINARY
       If the return code of the check binary is not zero watchdog will assume
       an error and reboot the system. A positive exit code is interpreted as
       a system error code (see errno.h for details).

so in this particular case (error 101), according to errno.h:

ENETUNREACH 101 /* Network is unreachable */

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux watchdog and systemd watchdog

Linux – Error codes for watchdog daemon

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