watchdog reset

[Katherine Minister Hosch]

Howdy all.  This has happened twice now, and I'm starting to get a little
worried.  We have a standalone 4/260 that crashed the other day, leaving
only the message (on the console):

	> watchdog reset

I rebooted, and ran fsck, but it didn't seem to have any big problems.
Today it crashed again, with the same console message.  The messages file
didn't contain anything the first time, but the second time there was a
message from two days ago about a memory failure:

Jul 29 13:48:41 mars vmunix: mem3: soft ecc addr 4ce550 syn 5b<S16,S4,S2,S0,SX> 41 U1841

Somehow I suspect that the message is unrelated to the reset though.

My question is this:  what *causes* a 'watchdog reset', other than pushing
the 'reset' button on the back of the machine?  In neither case was the
button pushed.  

This sounds like a bad problem to me; does anyone have any ideas about it?

Katherine Minister Hosch:		kam at titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu
Applied Research Laboratories		(512)-835-3148
University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 8029, Austin, TX  78713-8029