True Watchdog for SOHO

It would be great to have a true watchdog feature on the SOHO so that it reboots by itself when it hangs/crashes.
Currently there are failure modes where the SOHO’s AP crashes, and sometimes the LANs too, but the SOHO just sits there blinking its green lights, requiring a power cycle to recover.
The watchdog feature would detect that and restart the SOHO automatically so that it could recover by itself.

@peparn

Watchdog is supported for SOHO. It’s a hidden feature for advance user only and you can find the option in support.cgi page.

Found that you have another forum thread reporting that your SOHO device having auto reboot/freeze issue. It would be best that you can let us look at the problem. Let’s discuss further your issue via the issue post.

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Hi @sitloongs, great to hear from you :slight_smile:
I had seen the Watchdog Support feature on the support page, but I thought it was only monitoring the cell connection according to this post. Also in that post it says to not use this watchdog because it is only for use by support for troubleshooting purposes.
Are you saying that this is a true watchdog that could be used to automatically reboot the router when the AP fails for example? Would it be possible to get more information about what this hidden watchdog feature actually monitors and what the automatic reboot/recover criteria are?
Thank you.

@peparn

Sorry if my explanation for the previous post is not clear enough. The Watchdog feature is not for the Cellular or WIFI AP.

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For the WIFI issue that you are having, i would really need your help to allow us to investigate on the issue.

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Thanks for the clarification @sitloongs. So just to make sure:

  1. This watchdog is a standard hardware based watchdog timer that will reboot the router if the software crashes enough that it cannot service the timer on time.
  2. Even though this post claims this watchdog should not be used by end-users, it is ok to use it. It is not going to cause additional instabilities in the system.

I am looking forward to your confirmation of the above. If confirmed, I will go ahead and enable it instead of the preventive daily scheduled reboots we currently have. Thanks.

As explained by @sitloongs here, Watchdog will trigger the reboot if the device is crashed. It is the last defender to recover the device from the crash. This feature is not advisable for end-user since this needs certain technical knowledge. We keen to look into the problem instead of enable the Watchdog.

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Thank you @TK_Liew for the confirmations in regards to my questions above. I am an advanced user and have been a low level firmware developer for years, so I will take my chances :slight_smile: and enable the watchdog instead of a daily reboot, until the issue currently under investigation by @sitloongs is addressed. If the watchdog works as intended this will be more efficient and we will incur a lot less reboots than when doing daily forced reboots (device crashes ever 4.5 days more or less).
The important thing for me was to make sure the watchdog feature was what I was expecting it to be, and you have confirmed that (I think).
Cheers!