What to do with Watchdog.

[matt.simpson]

Okay, from what I've briefly read, this "Watchdog" script is crappy. I discovered there was some sort of problem because qMail kept stopping. This randomly happened and it was really ticking me off.

Either way. My question is:

Do really need to disable and remove the entire Watchdog module or is it sufficient enough to just have to stop monitoring qMail?

I've heard 3 different things:
1. Having it stop monitoring qmail.
2. Disable the Watchdog module.
3. Don't just disable it, remove it all together.

---

So with that being said, which is it?

Regards,
Matt Simpson

 

[vyacheslav]

I had to change the qMail command path to /etc/init.d/qmail start/stop from the original ../psa/.. (I forgot what it was). It runs fine so far.

But Watchdog is not compatible with SpamAssassin. It totally throws it off, disables the light_sock, I had to disable the Dog on SA.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Matt, you can do any of the above, but our recommendation is to uninstall the Watchdog module and use something comparable which actually works...

Why make use of a partially functional software when there are free and low cost alternatives which work much better?

 

[vyacheslav]

I agree, but the thing is that the Dog isn't critical to us right now and it's a new add-on in PSA so we're test-driving it. We have other means to monitor services.
I hope SWsoft will revamp the Dog in new PSA release.
What alternatives are you using?
Thanks.

 

[Spacey@]

My qmail crashed also several times after installing the watchdog on SuSe 9.3 with 7.5.4 & DrWeb & SpamAssassin. I disabled the dog and then removed it via Plesk. Hope that helps...

 

[sieb@]

I just setup our network using IPCheck to monitor all the services. It doesn't make much sense to have the servers check itself considering if the server goes down, then it can't check itself. This is why I have a seperate monitoring server outside the network to watch all of them.

 

[cmaxwell]

I think Watchdog is getting better - in comparison to the first version which was released it has improved quite a bit.

It's not half as accurate as other open source packages such as SIM, but it's quite nice to be able to have monitoring built-in to Plesk as an "all in one" solution.

Let's hope they improve it - although, my feelings are that it should just work because it's simple to check if an HTTP server is responding, for instance!

In saying that, if it's so simple then why do there continue to be bugs after multiple releases...

 

[Whistler]

Originally posted by sieb
I just setup our network using IPCheck to monitor all the services. It doesn't make much sense to have the servers check itself considering if the server goes down, then it can't check itself. This is why I have a seperate monitoring server outside the network to watch all of them.

If I understand the concept of the WatchDog this is not just to monitor services but it also tries to restart the service if not running.

(which as far as I rembemer causes the qmail failure)

But as I've never actually used it as it stops qmail - I'm not sure I ever got the intensions behind the module sorted out

 

[roberto@]

Yes just uninstall watchdog! It's bugged

And I don't understand why swsoft is putting this f** module