Watchcat - network watchdog utility

Install the packages watchcat and luci-app-watchcat.

Watchcat is a ping-watchdog utility that allows you to set up rules for when a ping to a particular host fails.

The following modes of operation are available

• Ping Reboot: reboot the OpenWrt device if a ping to a specific host fails
• Restart Interface: restart a network interface if a ping to a host over that interface fails
• Periodic Reboot: reboot at a set period of time, such as every 24h.

mode - the mode this watchcat instance is in.

• ping_reboot
• restart_iface
• periodic_reboot

period - the way this parameter is used depends on the mode watchcat is in:

• Periodic Reboot: the interval of time at which to perform the reboot, such as every 24h
• Ping Reboot: the longest interval of time without a successful ping before the rule is activated
• Restart Interface: the longest interval of time without a successful ping before the rule is activated

Period examples

• 10 seconds would be: 10 or 10s
• 5 minutes would be: 5m
• 1 hour would be: 1h
• 1 week would be: 7d

pinghosts - In Ping Reboot and Restart Interface modes, the host(s) to ping/monitor

pingperiod - how often to ping

Ping Period examples

• every 10 seconds would be: 10 or 10s
• every 5 minutes would be: 5m
• every 1 hour would be: 1h
• every week would be: 7d

pingsize - the size of packet to use for pings.

Supported ping size values

• small - 1 byte
• windows - 32 bytes
• standard - 56 bytes
• big - 248 bytes
• huge - 1492 bytes
• jumbo - 9000 bytes

interface - the interface to ping via, and also, in Restart Interface mode the one to restart. If unset, it will use the default route's interface.

Interface examples

• eth1
• wwan0

forcedelay - in Ping Reboot and Periodic Reboot modes, the amount of time to try a graceful reboot before a sysreq reboot is activated as a fail safe.

mmifacename - name of a ModemManager interface to restart - if set it will restart the ModemManager service when that interface goes down.

Modem Manager Interface Name example

• mobiledata

unlockbands - if set to 1 it will issue mmcli -m any --set-current-bands=any when the rule is activated

Possible unlockbands values

• 0 - disabled (default)
• 1 - enabled

Note restart_iface mode, interface, pingsize, mmifacename unlockbands parameters are available after commit: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/commit/d5047303d6ad052f0249350a205015d149882e0e

The following are examples of a config watchcat stanza for a rule in the /etc/config/watchcat configuration file:

- Ping host 192.168.1.1 (gateway) every 30s (30 seconds) via the interface eth1.1 and reboot if it fails for 5m (5 minutes) or longer and wait up to 1m (1 minute) for a soft reboot before requesting a hard reboot:

config watchcat
  option interface 'eth1.1'
  option period '5m'
  option mode 'ping_reboot'
  option pinghosts '192.168.1.1'
  option pingperiod '30s'
  option forcedelay '1m'

- Reboot the device every 3d (3 days) and wait up to 2m (2 minutes) for a soft reboot before requesting a hard reboot:

config watchcat
  option mode 'periodic_reboot'
  option period '3d'
  option forcedelay '2m'