> Nowadays this watchdog is init/PID1, on most distributions - systemd. If init can't be relied on to manage services, what guarantees do you have for the syste

> Nowadays this watchdog is init/PID1, on most distributions - systemd. If init can't be relied on to manage services, what guarantees do you have for the system to provide them? Does that monitor actual (not just apparent link up) network connectivity or the ability to access remote networks? Not all failure modes are local to OS processes and sometimes rebooting fixes things like this. process-specific monitoring can be quite useful but so is a generic "I can't reach my server I just want it to reboot now" with minimal complexity/dependencies. I can't imagine all of the failure modes where a simple bash watchdog script would help - and that's the point! Now, if you have OOB access to the server (like in a data center) then you might not need or even want a watchdog script. But for remote and/or difficult to access servers (I refer to these as "mars probes"), they can be a life saver.