You might also want to look into the watchdog package.  All of my 
machines that have IPMI support also have a hardware watchdog device. 
You can use the ipmi_watchdog kernel module (or another hw watchdog 
module) set with various options along with this piece of software to 
have the hardware automatically power cycle should the software fail to 
reset a hardware timer after a period.  This would allow the hardware to 
automatically recover from some sort of software lockup like a kernel panic.

Brian
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