This high quality pc watchdog board is now also available for the PCI and low profile PCI bus. The PC Watchdog card monitors a PC for software or hardware lock-ups to ensure 24/7 system availability. It provides a solution for Telecom, ISPs, Webservers, Voice Mail, File Servers, and Industrial systems that occasionally lock up but must be available on a continuous basis. We designed a board that is a Plug & Play compatible PCI watchdog card.
There are sample projects ( sources ) for the main compilers and interpreters i.e. Visual-C++, Visual-Basic, Borland Delphi, Sun Java and even MS Excel or MS Access are supported.
This watchdogs supports the
ATX Reset Cable that can be connected between the motherboard and the cable from the ATX power supply. It allows a PC to be reset by momentarily removing the Power Good signal from the power supply to the motherboard.
For Microsoft Windows NT 4.x / 2000 / XP, an additional NT service (WDSERV.EXE) is supplied which works as a background process. The WDSERV is an watchdog software addon for machines that require 24 h availability. The WDSERV NT 4.x and Windows 2000 service executes the nescessary accesses on the QUANCOM watchdog in the background. After a system crash, the system will be rebooted automatically. The program works totally in the background, so nobody has to be logged on at the machine.
The Watchdogs are supported by the QLIB (QUANCOM Driver Library), and therefore allows an easy programming under various operating systems. To support developers we included a driver installation toolkit for OEM manufacturers or software developers. The sources and executable for the Linux backgound program are included on the CD-Rom.
In the scope of delivery there are many useful software applications and libraries. The software to use depends on the used operating system or your application. To access the hardware following possibilities exist :
| • Method 1: | WDSERV - Standalone Solution for 24/7 Windows XP / 2000 / NT Systems ( this software is running as background service ) |
| • Method 2: | Install the QLIB for use with existing software ( i.e. Sitekiosk Kiosk Browser Software ) |
| • Method 3: | High-Level Programming ( Visual-Basic, Visual-C++, Borland Delphi, Borland C++, ...) with the QLIB, that provides a common API to the programmers. |
| • Method 4: | Direct I/O - Access the hardware registers directly, all operating systems, recommended only for professional programmers |
| • Method 5: | LINUX Drivers, Daemon and Source Files included, QUANCOM URL Checker for the Apache Webserver. |
| • Method 6: | DOS Standalone program ( Watchdog.exe - TSR DOS program - ) |
Method 1 is the preferred method if the complete system is to be monitored and the operating system is Windows NT4.x or Windows 2000. The WDSERV monitors the system and programs the Watchdog in the background and no user needs to be logged on.
Method 2 allows you to make the QUANCOM watchdog running with existing software. I.e. the
Sitekiosk Kiosk Browser Software. Sitekiosk offers you an almost infinite number of possibilities to configure your Internet terminal according to your needs. It offers you all the functions to operate a secure terminal. Because of some software problems and the possibility of a BSOD ( blue screen of death ) the manufacturer protects the terminal software with an optional hardware watchdog plugin.
With
Method 3 you can integrate the watchdog in your own application. To do this in Visual-C, Visual-Basic, Delphi or any other compiler or interpreter, first install the
QLIB. Then copy the file QLIB.H, QLIB.BAS or QLIB.PAS to your source project files. These files belong to the QLIB and you find them in the
"include" directory of the QLIB Installation. If you are using compilers like Visual-C or Borland Delphi you have to add the library file QLIB32.LIB to your project. The compiler needs this file to find the references to the QLIB32.DLL, which holds the programming API. Interpreters like Visual-Basic don't need this library. Now the programmer can use the API functions
QAPIWatchdogEnable() to activate the watchdog,
QAPIWatchdogDisable() to disable it, and
QAPIWatchdogRetrigger() to reset the internal watchdog timer. When you start your application activate the watchdog with
QAPIWatchdogEnable(). While the program is running, continously call the function
QAPIWatchdogRetrigger(). This signals the watchdog that the application is alive. When the application crashes it can't call the function and the watchdog restarts the system. Before terminating your application, call the function
QAPIWatchdogDisable() to shut down the watchdog.
If you use
Method 4 you need the sources for the application. You have to access the hardware registers directly with i/o commands and you are responsible to add the programming statements in the application. For using this method knowledge in programming drivers is necessary. See the documentation for a complete discussion of the hardware registers.
Method 5 is used on Linux systems. There is a Linux Driver and a Watchdog Daemon download below and the sources for these programs are included. This allows recompiling the sources when the linux version changes. You may also incorperate the linux functions from the watchdog daemon to your linux application. The daemon is a program that opens the watchdog driver as a file
"dev/watchdog" and then continously writes a char to driver. This resets the internal watchdog timer of the watchdog hardware. Secondly we provide the Webserver URL Checker Application that can check multiple Webservers. It sends a http request to the server, recognizes the received pattern of the "http" response and restarts the system on failure.
Method 6 is used for DOS and Windows 3.x operating systems. It is a watchdog TSR program for DOS systems and has the same functionality like the NT Service WDSERV.