How to force a thread to stop

[Carl J. Van Arsdall]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> H J van Rooyen <mail at microcorp.co.za> wrote:
>
>   
>> "Paul Rubin" <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> Writes:
>>
>> | "H J van Rooyen" <mail at microcorp.co.za> writes:
>> | > *grin* - Yes of course - if the WDT was enabled - its something that
>> | > I have not seen on PC's yet...
>> |
>> | They are available for PC's, as plug-in cards, at least for the ISA
>> | bus in the old days, and almost certainly for the PCI bus today.
>>
>> That is cool, I was not aware of this - added to a long running server it will
>> help to make the system more stable - a hardware solution to hard to find bugs
>> in Software - (or even stuff like soft errors in hardware - speak to the
>> Avionics boys about Neutrons) do you know who sells them and what they are
>> called? -
>>     
>
> When you're talking about a bunch of (multiprocessing) machines on a
> LAN, you can have a "watchdog machine" (or more than one, for
> redundancy) periodically checking all others for signs of health -- and,
> if needed, rebooting the sick machines via ssh (assuming the sickness is
> in userland, of course -- to come back from a kernel panic _would_
> require HW support)... so (in this setting) you _could_ do it in SW, and
> save the $100+ per box that you'd have to spend at some shop such as
> <http://www.pcwatchdog.com/> or the like...
>
>
>   
Yea, there are other free solutions you might want to check out, I've 
been looking at ganglia and nagios.  These require constant 
communication with a server, however they are customizable in that you 
can have the server take action on various events. 

Cheers!

-c


-- 

Carl J. Van Arsdall
cvanarsdall at mvista.com
Build and Release
MontaVista Software