Clever! But why do that when you can just buy devices that will do that? In fact, last time I toured AboveNet I saw rackmounted versions that could power cycle a bunch of different machines.
The server was actually still running when it happened, but the Apache process what butt locked.
www:~ >/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd status
pid exists but process is dead
www:~ >
(or something like that)
What I was thinking was running a separate server (http, ftp, whatever) that would enable you to touch a file that would flag a cron job to reHUP the process.
[/geek speak]