Watchdog devices are important to be sure our servers are working. Unfortunately, watchdog daemon seem to crash if enabled on Rasbperry PI.

The problem is that our Pis have a strange watchdog hardware device and needs to be petted quite often. Because of this, running the watchdog daemon without some special flags won't work as standard FreeBSD petting time is too high.

All you need to do is enable watchdog and add a flags line with some specfic options. Open the /etc/rc.conf file with your favourite editor and add:

watchdogd_flags="-s 4 -t 8"
watchdogd_enable="YES"

Now reboot or just restart the watchdog daemon: service watchdogd restart

The daemon will launch and start using the hardware watchdog.