I might be able to try this in the next few days. I have a system I'm re-imaging and I'll see if I can find time to test this. Without going too far off topic I think that both openipmi and freeipmi are good solutions for communicating with your BMC and the hardware watchdog and both worked for me. I chose to deploy freeipmi over openipmi because it doesn't require you to load any device drivers and because I felt that the documentation was clearer.
I might be able to try this in the next few days. I have a system I'm re-imaging and I'll see if I can find time to test this. Without going too far off topic I think that both openipmi and freeipmi are good solutions for communicating with your BMC and the hardware watchdog and both worked for me. I chose to deploy freeipmi over openipmi because it doesn't require you to load any device drivers and because I felt that the documentation was clearer.