Relation between mcpd and linux

That's an interesting debate. How often should I reboot my devices. The best rule of thumb I can provide is reboot

1. When you make a change to the startup process. After all you want to make sure it comes back up cleanly right?
2. Just before patching. You want to know whether the patching broke it, or it was broken before if it does break. So a sanity reboot is always good here.

Given you should be patching regularly, I'd hesitate to say you're a good netizen for any device having an uptime of years nowadays (Despite the fact that if you search you can probably find me extolling AIX uptimes of >400 days in the past :) ). They may be able to run that way, but you might want to examine the vulnerabilities that are present on a 5 yo OS...

We went through a bad batch of hardware many years back too... They'd break on power up. So the answer was to have the network guys in the DC hit reset on the ACTIVE unit on a scheduled basis. Full CHG process, but it certainly weeded out the bad HW... And you had a lot more confidence that in the event of a power loss in the DC (That does happen) you could be more certain that your hardware would come back up