watchdog

watchdog: A software watchdog The watchdog program writes to /dev/watchdog every ten seconds. If the device is open but not written to within a minute the machine will reboot -- a feature available when "software watchdog" support is compiled into the kernel. The ability to reboot will depend on the state of the machine and interrupts. To use this software, linux 1.3.52 or later is needed. From Debian 3.0r0 APT

* Linux/Unix/Computing Glossary Index