[ClusterLabs] Softdog challenges on Ubuntu

[Andrei Borzenkov]

14.01.2025 00:03, Ross Sponholtz wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> I’ve been setting up clusters on RHEL and SLES in Azure just fine for quite a while, but I’ve recently been asked to do the same thing on Ubuntu.  Everything has gone fine, but my one challenge is that I can’t get the softdog watchdog driver to load at boot time.  In Azure we need to use softdog because there is no hardware watchdog available at this time.
> 
> In trying to get this to work, I’ve put “softdog” in the proper files (I’ve tried /etc/modules, /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf and /etc/modules-load.d/softdog.conf).
> I’m getting this error in the syslog:
> 
> systemd-modules-load[175]: Module 'softdog' is deny-listed (by kmod)
> 
> However, I can load the softdog module just fine after the machine boots up using modprobe.
> 
> I’ve checked the normal places for a blacklist entry (eg. /etc/modprobe.d) and there isn’t a single reference to softdog.  I’ve literally searched the whole machine for any reference to softdog (eg. find / | xargs grep softdog > /tmp/softdog.lst) and all I got was lines from the log files.  Also, there is no other watchdog kernel module loaded that I can tell, and before I load the softdog module there is no /dev/watchdog device.

bor at bor-Latitude-E5450:~$ grep PRETTY_NAME /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS"
bor at bor-Latitude-E5450:~$ modprobe -c | grep -w softdog
blacklist softdog
blacklist softdog
blacklist softdog
blacklist softdog
bor at bor-Latitude-E5450:~$


> 
> Other than this my cluster seems to work just fine.
> 
> Any suggestions on how to fix this?
> 
> BTW, there was some conversation about this on the list back in June of 2022, but there was never a mention of how to load this module automatically.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ross Sponholtz
> 
> 
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