manipulating/testing file times.

[Cathey, Jim]

>We have a hardware watchdog, but at present it is tickled simply by a
>single simple process...

Badness, as you suspect.  Rearrange to periodically survey
your system's health at the highest possible level and use
that status to kick the dog.  Then if anything fails it'll
go down and restart.  Naturally you don't factor into the
dog-kicking decision anything for which a reboot is _not_
the correct action!

-- Jim