[vdr] Re: Heartbeat for VDR

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:

>Jan Ekholm wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Our VDR box has two leds that I use to indicate "recording in progress"
>> and "VDR is on". However I'd like to make one led flash when VDR has died
>> for some reason, or the stream has been broken, actually for anything that
>> would require a restart.
>>
>> Flashing the led is easy, as is restarting VDR. The harder part is to get
>> some kind of "heartbeat" from VDR so that my plugin/patch knows that VDR
>> is alive and healthy. What would be a good place to put in such a probe? A
>> normal plugin has the Housekeeping() method, but it is not guaranteed to
>> be called regularly. I'd like to be able to be notified/probe maybe once a
>> minute or something like that.
>>
>> One solution could be to create a device and attach it to the stream? That
>> would let my plugin get notified often enough, and it would just skip the
>> data and do nothing with it. What happens for a broken stream? Does the
>> attached device still get called with null data?
>>
>> Or is there some much better way of doing this? The main idea is to have
>> the plugin/patch somehow write out a timestamp that an external app can
>> monitor, and when the timestamp is too old VDR is assumed dead and will be
>> restarted.
>
>VDR already has its very own watchdog feature that initiates
>a restart in case something goes south.
>
>Have you tried the --watchdog option yet?

Yes, but it has never restarted anything for me, at least nothing that has
shown up in the log. Buffer overruns probably don't warrant a restart, and
outright crashes are impossible for it to catch, but I've seen the image
die with stream corruption (or similar) and VDR bail out due to errors and
still no restart. And it sure is enables, as VDR logs:

	...
	19:07:17 vdr[333]: setting watchdog timer to 60 seconds
	...

-- 

        Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.
                                             -- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods


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