Having managed to kill sshd on a remote machine (by running a script which used all available memory in the machine, oops...) which I have no access to other than visiting the hosting for[1], I was considering ways to ensure that sshd is always kept running.
Other than a hacky cron job to restart sshd every n minutes or hours, using inittab to get init to keep sshd running seems like a good idea.
Are there any drawbacks from this approach? It would seem like something which it would be sensible for Linux distros to do by default, since sshd is often the only available method of access for a machine..
Additionally, are there any other daemons which I should be using this approach for? Perhaps a monitoring agent such as nrpe for nagios?
[1] Yes, management cards or a network power switch would be a good idea, but they were deemed "unnecessary" at the time...