I had a few issues with the watchdog driver not doing its job properly in the past.

My network setup is the following: kstars on a pc inside the house, remote INDI server outside the house, both connected using 2GHz wifi.

Periodically, I would observe that the remote server would be just too far to catch the wifi signal. Either I could not connect to the server, or I was loosing connection. Sometimes the connection would be lost in the middle of the night and not recovered. Basic network issues with range you would say.

So I added the Watchdog driver to the remote setup, to avoid leaving the mount to track and hit the tripod without any client to stop it.

I observed that when kstars was crashing (yeah old days), the watchdog would take over and park the mount properly.

But I also observed that when the remote server was loosing the wifi connection, the watchdog would not do its job. Besides, I also observed that kstars would not notify the disconnection when wifi was lost, although it would if the remote server stopped or crashed while online. In that freezed situation of course remote drivers would be unresponsive.

On one occurrence of wifi loss, I rebooted the remote, so the INDI server was "stopped", and brought the computer back in range. When I returned to kstars it had notified the disconnection. So there might be a different timeout.

This said, what concerns me is that the watchdog wouldn't do its job. I'm wondering what happens to the network stack of the remote server when it loses wifi. Specifically, I wonder if the watchdog driver is able to actually send the park requests if no network is available or if the network is hung. I would imagine loopback communication would still be possible, but well.

The remote server is headless and ssh-only, so this is a bit tricky to investigate...

Besides, the range issue disappeared when I upgraded for a newer wifi router. But the discussion may be interesting to others. Any idea?

-Eric