🐶 A watchdog for the rport service on Windows

✋ Use only if really needed! The rport client is robust and always re-establishes the connection to the rport server. The watchdog should only be used in rare cases when have experienced lost connections. Do not use as a generic preventive measure.

A watchdog that supervises the rport service and restarts it when needed. The watchdog script is intended to be run every five minutes as a scheduled task.

If you have the rport watchdog integration enabled, this scripts checks the internal state of the rport client by reading the state.json file.

If the rport client has not actively confirmed its successful connection to the rport server, the timestamp inside the json file will become obsolete. The scripts will compare this timestamp with the current time and restart the rport service if the given threshold is exceeded.

Installation & Usage

From a PowerShell with administrative rights

If you haven't activated the watchdog integration, do so:

Set-Location "C:\Program Files\rport"
(Get-Content -path rport.conf -Raw) -replace '#watchdog_integration = false','watchdog_integration = true'|`
 Set-Content -Path rport.conf
restart-service rport
Get-Content  .\data\state.json

Download the watchdog script, test and install.

cd "C:\Program Files\rport"
iwr https://github.com/cloudradar-monitoring/rport-win-watchdog/releases/latest/download/watchdog.ps1 `
-OutFile watchdog.ps1

Test, if the state file can be read:

PS> .\watchdog.ps1 -Threshold 90
09/15/2022 19:44:15: RPort is running fine. Last activity 27.7940099239349 seconds ago (< 90).

Before registering the scheduled task, read about what's your best threshold.

Register the script as a scheduled task:

PS>  .\watchdog.ps1 -Threshold 300 -Register
Registering scheduled task ...
Task "RPort-Watchdog" ["C:\Program Files\rport\watchdog.ps1"] scheduled every 5 minutes.

More options

Unregister aka stop the watchdog:

.\watchdog.ps1 -Unregister

Check, if it's working:

PS> .\watchdog.ps1 -State
Task RPort-Watchdog is registered with state: Ready


LastRunTime        : 9/15/2022 7:54:54 PM
LastTaskResult     : 0
NextRunTime        : 9/15/2022 7:59:59 PM
NumberOfMissedRuns : 0
TaskName           : RPort-Watchdog
TaskPath           :
PSComputerName     :

Get the full help message:

Get-Help .\watchdog.ps1 -Full