I initially thought I had this solved with my 2 tasks [1 to start service upon startup and s second running every hour]
However, this was not totally effective in keeping all hosts online.
I have had to go a step further and add a task that performs a stop service then start service at 4am every day.
Without this task, I was finding that some [not all] hosts would go grey, and never come back online. The service itself was running, but the host was just offline.
It is not an issue that occurs every day, it seems very random. The best theory I have is that if the host loses connectivity to the RU server for an [as yet unknown] extended amount of time, it seems to give up trying, and never reconnects. Maybe there is a connection retry limit in the hosts somewhere.
The 4am daily restart so far appears to be dealing with this issue for me, and as I typically do not need overnight sessions to stay active, it does not have any negative impact here. However, my gripe is that if the remote host restarts and I have left a session running, the screen at my viewer end will show offline, but does not close, then when I have to close the viewer window, it takes about 5-8 seconds for each window to close, which is frustrating.
I have only implemented these recurring tasks [I call it the RUM; Remote Utilities Monitor] on a small number of our hosts, but overall, the reliability has improved significantly on these, whilst the non RUM'd machines are often problematic.
It would be great if RU could have its own watchdog service built in, so we would not have implement our own.
Matthew