watchcat: restart_iface can repeatedly restart an interface during a outage

[dhrm1k]

Package Name

watchcat

Maintainer

Roger D rogerdammit@gmail.com (@roger- )

OpenWrt Version

24.10.4

OpenWrt Target/Subtarget

x86/64

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install and enable watchcat.
2. Configure a rule with:
   • mode='restart_iface'
   • period='5'
   • pingperiod='1s'
   • pinghosts='203.0.113.1'
   • interface='br-lan'
3. Restart the service:

   /etc/init.d/watchcat restart

4. Observe the logs:

   logread | grep watchcat

Actual Behaviour

When the host remains unreachable, watchcat keeps restarting the
interface repeatedly during the same outage.

Example log output:

Wed May  6 14:46:55 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Could not reach 203.0.113.1 via "br-lan" for "10" seconds. Restarting "br-lan" after reaching "5" seconds
Wed May  6 14:46:55 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Restarting network interface: "br-lan".
Wed May  6 14:47:05 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Could not reach 203.0.113.1 via "br-lan" for "10" seconds. Restarting "br-lan" after reaching "5" seconds
Wed May  6 14:47:05 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Restarting network interface: "br-lan".
Wed May  6 14:47:15 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Could not reach 203.0.113.1 via "br-lan" for "10" seconds. Restarting "br-lan" after reaching "5" seconds
Wed May  6 14:47:15 2026 daemon.info watchcat[22624]: Restarting network interface: "br-lan".

This continues roughly once per check cycle while the outage persists.

The issue appears to be that restart_iface resets the failure timer
using a timestamp taken before the recovery action runs. If the restart
itself takes longer than the configured period (the time taken for interface
down and up in simple words), the next failed check can
immediately exceed the threshold again and trigger another restart.

Confirmation Checklist

• The package is maintained in this repository.
• I understand that issues related to the base OpenWrt repository or LuCI repository will be closed.
• I am reporting an issue for OpenWrt, not an unsupported fork.

[dhrm1k]

I have time on my hands and I found a solution. I will make a PR.