Only one comes to mind: IMNSO, the only OSes I've seen that don't do better with weekly restarts are VMS and MVS (maybe OS/390, I haven't worked with it much.)

Holding a lock for a week at a time and doing a controlled restart should be entirely safe under Windows NT 4.0 or later, any modern Linux, SCO, etc.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, are there parts of Big Brother or Nagios that could save you some coding time?

Abigail: Thanks for the good idea, I've got a problem similar to Nitrox's in my current project and I like your solution an awful lot better than what I'm doing now. ++.

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Spring: Forces, Coiled Again!