bmc-watchdog collector fails with "invalid option -- h" for remote targets

[aahmadzada-png]

Description

The bmc-watchdog collector fails when scraping remote IPMI targets with the error: bmc-watchdog: invalid option -- h

Environment

• ipmi_exporter version: 1.10.1
• FreeIPMI bmc-watchdog version: 1.6.16
• Target: Remote IPMI devices (e.g., 192.168.1.100:623)

Error Logs

time=2025-12-30T08:30:14.219Z level=ERROR source=collector_bmc_watchdog.go:97 msg="Failed to collect BMC watchdog timer" target=192.168.1.100:623 error="error running bmc-watchdog: exit status 64: bmc-watchdog: invalid option -- h\nTry `bmc-watchdog --help' or `bmc-watchdog --usage' for more information.\n"
time=2025-12-30T08:30:14.219Z level=ERROR source=collector.go:120 msg="Collector failed" name=bmc-watchdog error="error running bmc-watchdog: exit status 64: bmc-watchdog: invalid option -- h\nTry `bmc-watchdog --help' or `bmc-watchdog --usage' for more information.\n"

Expected Behavior

The bmc-watchdog collector should successfully collect metrics from remote IPMI targets.

Additional Information

bmc-watchdog help output shows no -h option, maybe it not supports remote scraping?

[raspbeguy]

The failure is real, and it cannot be fixed on the FreeIPMI side: bmc-watchdog has no --hostname or -h option at all, it only talks to the local BMC, so passing -h <target> can only produce invalid option -- h. Get Watchdog Timer itself is an ordinary App netfn command (IPMI v2.0 section 27.7) and works fine over the network. It is this one FreeIPMI tool that cannot do it.

There is a way to do it today: with --native-ipmi, the bmc-watchdog collector does read a remote BMC. We have it working against two Supermicro X9SRL-F BMCs scraped from a third machine, with ipmi_up{collector="bmc-watchdog"} 1.

One thing to know before relying on it: the countdown metrics from the native collector are currently 10 times too large, because the 100ms units in the response are published on *_seconds metrics. See #368, which has a fix.