A watchdog is a mechanism for detecting system states
(e.g. full filesystems, database failures, etc.)
that require immediate attention by project staff.
Typically the desired response to such a condition is
to notify a pager, sending a short text description.
BOINC provides a framework for defining watchdogs:
-
A set of watchdog scripts are run from cron.
Each script checks for an error condition,
and present, it appends a descriptive line to an error log file.
An example is wd_nresults_changing.php,
which makes sure that the number of results changes.
-
The script wd.php, also run from cron,
scans the error log files.
If any has been updated since the last run,
it sends email to a set of recipients,
containing the last line of the file.
These files are in the sched/ directory.
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