On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on
Back in the day, when I was cutting my teeth on embedded systems, I read an Intel Application Note - probably for the 8051.  The section about managing watchdog timers stated that it is often good practice to deliberately let the watchdog time out periodically, at a convenient time.  Then the system would be reset to a predictable state regularly, and failure states leading to unplanned watchdog timeouts would occur less frequently.<p>To this day, all my systems which are intended for prolonged unattended operation reset themselves at least once a day.