See, if it were a real operating system, you could just use a cron or at job...

Which is exactly what I had to do on one Linux box that I managed years ago. It had a dodgy network card or motherboard (never did work out which), which caused it to start to slow down it's AppleTalk routing after being up for more that about 13 hours or so. I had to resort to a cron job that rebooted it every 12 hours.

All because "those in charge" weren't willing to let me spend a few hundred quid on buying a replacement motherboard and five new network cards (yes it really did have 5 network cards in it, it routed 5 separate AppleTalk networks). I was pretty sure it was a hardware problem as I had and identical machine in the other building that performed flawlessly.